Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

(Photo by tankgirl) Yesterday I was talking with Cristina Costa on skype about supporting communities of practice with social software. Talking about one of the groups she works with she said: “getting this community to twitter is proving harder than getting a donkey to walk downhill.” LOL. Well I nearly fell off my chair. I didn’t know that it was hard to get a donkey to walk downhill but it seems it is. I feel a graphic coming on.

But seriously, Cristina’s point does raise some issues. Much of Pontydysgu’s work is developing applications to support social networking in communities of practice and, perhaps more importantly, facilitating the process of social collaboration and learning. Most of the communities we work in are not techy. They are not interested in the technology itself but the affordances it provides in their work and work-life.

It is not easy. Many people are unsure about technologies. Even simple interfaces can be confusing. People are especially confused by us using so many different tools. And for the more techncially confident, people often have their own favoured tools and ways of working. What one person likes is not necessarily what suits another. My friend Jenny and I both have the same Ibooks. We have much the same software. But we use the machines in totally different ways. She files things carefully in a well organised folder structure. She closes one programe before opening another. I only close a programme if the machine starts grinding to a halt. I tend to leave things lying around everywhere and use the search function when I want to find something.

People are also struggling with multiple community sites. We cannot blog everywhere. And only a minority are used to using newsreaders so tend to feel every new community is an imposition to have to log in to find out what is going on. More fundamenatelly, many people are not comfortable or do not wish to share personal data and be so open in their personal lives in the way that we have come to associate with social software. Many people value their privacy. Twitter seems to be for those who make little distinction between their personal and work lives. Yet many of those we work with do make a distinction.

Communities of Practice are bound by a shared practice and shared artefacts of that practice. ICT based applications can support the sharing of practice but are not in themselves an artefact of the practice. There is no reason why members of Communities of Practice will have the same experience of using software or have the same attitudes towards personal openness and sharing.

One of the big problems we constantly face is terminology. On one site we run I had used the term ‘About me’. The project co-ordinator was insistent we changed this to ‘profile’ saying this was the accepted term. Others of course will find such a term less friendly. How do we resolve such issues. Sometimes I fall back on that old idiom that our software would work perfectly if it was not for users! But, at the end of the day, much is down to the motivation to learn – what in Germany is called ‘Bereit(schaft)’. However we design the software it will always require some learning and without an openess to trying things , to experimenting, to learning, we will fail to involve individuals in the community.

The challenge for us is to overcome these issues. Be interested to know what you think Cristina.

This is the last LIVE edu-radio show before we take a summer break. The theme: Edupunks. And if you missed it here is your chance to download or listen online to the podcast version. If you heard the live version you can listen again!

First up in the show is Edupunk ‘poster boy’ Jim Groom – the man who first coined the name edupunk.

He is followed by Mike Caulfield from the University of Mary Washington. He talks about edupunks as a metaphor and about change cultures.

Helen Keegan explains how she developed a new ‘do it yourself’ course at the Univeristy of Salford. Helen explains the need for us to loosen up control.

Kathryn Greenhill from Australia explains that punklib is librarians doing it for themselves. She appeals for libraries to free up data.

Martin Weller, believes edupunk is a metaphor for the zeitgeist of our times. He talks about the tension between the culture of social networking and our instututional course provision.

Sounds of the Bazaar resident edu-granny, Leila Gray, reflects on the differences technology has made in her lifetime.

Margarita Perez Garcia wraps up the July edition of Emerging Mondays with three short experimental poems.

The music for this show is from the polish Rock-Punk-Alternative Band Adapters. We feature their album Adapters. You can find this album and a lot more music on the great Creative Commons music site Jamendo.com.

Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE [ 1:06:43 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1180)

Don’t miss this brilliant review – curiously filed by the Guardian newspaper under ‘Reference’ – by  linguistics Professor David Crystal on texting. David tells how langauge has always been changing and how the use of various forms of abbrieviations is not new.

“There are several distinctive features of the way texts are written that combine to give the impression of novelty, but none of them is, in fact, linguistically novel” he says. “Many of them were being used in chatroom interactions that predated the arrival of mobile phones. Some can be found in pre-computer informal writing, dating back a hundred years or more.”

He goes on to say that: “Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.”

He concludes: “An extraordinary number of doom-laden prophecies have been made about the supposed linguistic evils unleashed by texting. Sadly, its creative potential has been virtually ignored. But five years of research has at last begun to dispel the myths. The most important finding is that texting does not erode children’s ability to read and write. On the contrary, literacy improves. The latest studies (from a team at Coventry University) have found strong positive links between the use of text language and the skills underlying success in standard English in pre-teenage children. The more abbreviations in their messages, the higher they scored on tests of reading and vocabulary. The children who were better at spelling and writing used the most textisms. And the younger they received their first phone, the higher their scores.

Children could not be good at texting if they had not already developed considerable literacy awareness. Before you can write and play with abbreviated forms, you need to have a sense of how the sounds of your language relate to the letters. You need to know that there are such things as alternative spellings. If you are aware that your texting behaviour is different, you must have already intuited that there is such a thing as a standard. If you are using such abbreviations as lol and brb (“be right back”), you must have developed a sensitivity to the communicative needs of your textees.”

The Future of Content by Welsh edu-punk Martin Weller. And if you click though to the uTube version you can watch with annotations.

Yesterday this link arrived at my twitter channel via @ewanmcintosh. (isn’t twitter fab? ) Another great talk by Sir Ken Robinson. I didn’t expect it to be less than true inspiration after the last talk I had watched from him as part of the TED conference.

Yesterday evening, I finally was able to play the talk on my laptop. It was not only inspiring, it was extremely encouraging and thought provoking. The main message was, in my opinion, not to change the educational system, but rather to come up with a new one that will actually meet this age’s essence: individuality and diversity; customization and creativity.

Sir Robinson speaks about us aiming at the wrong challenge. It is not how we can make something better, as it is not about constantly reforming a system that was designed for a different age; It is about forming a new, or rather, new ways of helping us discover our natural talents. Our “geniuses” are being oppressed by education – isn’t it a pure antithesis of what we think education should be granting us?

And this brilliant speaker goes on with a brilliant thought I truly believe in: people do their best when they do what they love… when they are in their element. Isn’t it so true? Does it happen to you too? It does to me and it has always been so in school, at work, in everything I do. For instance, I hated when I had to memorize things I didn’t understand. My head would spin just to think about the electrons, atoms and molecules that, according to the teacher, were there up the air but whose point I always missed to see …so abstract it was, and so little skill the teachers had to explain it in a way it would make sense to ME. And as apparently it made sense to the others, I felt I should just shut up and set my mind to spend boring weekends at my desk trying to memorize words and sentences I couldn’t make out, but which would grant me a passing mark. On the other hand, I liked languages. I tried to understand the grammatical structured, examine the exceptions, observe how people expressed themselves, analyze  how language is cultural and experience related, how it also influences the way we think, etc. I was always fascinated by it. Learning languages is an ongoing challenge. And I always enjoyedit. As I did enjoy computer classes too. I therefore relate truly to the thought that when people discover what they can do, they become someone else, they transform, they bloom, they exceed what they thought to be their limits.

Trying to meet the future with ideas of the past is not the answer. We have to look at nature and learn from it. We need for once and for all to move from the industrial to an organic paradigm that will help provide the appropriate conditions to seed the right learning environments. Environments in which each learner will be valued and able to develop his/her genius in a creative way. And then I loved the way Sir Ken Robinson describes creativity: Original ideas with added value.

And he finishes with this amazing quote from Benjamin Franklin “All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.”

So, Let’s MOVE people! It’s about time.

Great picture by Alec Courosa

What is Edupunk?

Stephen Downes offers a definition: "edupunk is student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance." And an anonymous commentator on his post says: "I can’t think of anything more punk than education. For the student, learning gives power to the individual. A society full of mindless drones trained to each do a single task doesn’t really have the mental ability to rebel in meaningful ways. For the teacher, every day is an exercise in punk. You’re almost completely under the control of your coordinator, your principals, your superintendents, your school board, the media. Often, "the man" passes down restrictive rules and decisions that don’t seem to align with what’s best for you or your students. Often, you’re only equipped with sparse resources you’re able to scrap together here and there."

Are you into edupuank. Or is this just a ludicrous social construction by white males the wrong side of 40. The next Emerging Monday Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE radio programme on Monday 7 July will explore the edupunk phenomonon. With interviews,music opinion, poetry and more. LIVE. Guests include Kathryn Greenhill, Michael Caulfield and Martin Weller.

And hopefully we will be welcoming resident edupunk granny Leila back to the programme. Make sure the show is in your diary. We will be broadcasting LIVE from 1900 – 2000 UK Summer Time, 2000 – 2100 Central European Summer Time. To access the programme just click on this link or go to http://icecast.commedia.org.uk:8000/emerge.mp3.m3u and it shoudl open in your favourite MP3 player. And please tell your friends.

I don’t agree with centralised curricula and I think curricula should be developed by the community.

But I do agree with the spirit of this report from the Guardian newspaper.

“Children of all ages should study philosophy in school to develop their critical thinking skills, education experts said today….

The book Philosophy in Schools, edited by Dr Michael Hand of the Institute of Education and Dr Carrie Winstanley of Roehampton University, puts forward several arguments for including philosophy in the school curriculum.

“Critical thinkers are people who reason well, and who judge and act on the basis of their reasoning,” Hand says.

“To become critical thinkers, children must learn what constitutes good reasoning and why it’s important – and these are philosophical matters.

“Exposure to philosophy should be part of the basic educational entitlement of all children.”

In philosophy, the quality of arguments and the meanings of words are under constant scrutiny.

Winstanley said teachers could use popular books to initiate philosophical discussions. For example, Where the Wild Things Are could lead into debates on the existence of monsters, and why the main character’s mother sends him to his room without supper.

Winstanley said: “Better than any other subject, philosophy teaches children how to assess reasons, defend positions, define terms, evaluate sources of information and judge the value of arguments and evidence.”

Philosophy also allows younger children to engage in discussion and argument even before they know very much.”

Some funny ideas in the artcile. Children know a lot – even whan they are young. But yes, learninga bout ideas would be a usful start to education!

What is Edupunk? Stephen Downes offers a definition: “edupunk is student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance.”

And an anonymous commentator on his post says: “I can’t think of anything more punk than education.

For the student, learning gives power to the individual. A society full of mindless drones trained to each do a single task doesn’t really have the mental ability to rebel in meaningful ways.

For the teacher, every day is an exercise in punk. You’re almost completely under the control of your coordinator, your principals, your superintendents, your school board, the media. Often, “the man” passes down restrictive rules and decisions that don’t seem to align with what’s best for you or your students. Often, you’re only equipped with sparse resources you’re able to scrap together here and there.”

Are you into edupuank. Or is this just a ludicrous social construction by white males the wrong side of 40.

The next Emerging Monday Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE radio programme on Monday 7 July will explore the edupunk phenomonon. With interviews, music, opinion, poetry and more. LIVE. And hopefully we will be welcoming resident edupunk granny Leila back to the programme. Make sure the show is in your diary. We will be broadcasting LIVE from 1900 – 2000 UK Summer Time, 2000 – 2100 Central European Summer Time. To access the programme just click on this link and it should open in your favourite MP3 player. And please tell your friends.

I think I might have posted this some time ago. But it is worth looking at agin in teh context of developing Personal Learning Environments. I would argue that a central tole for a PLE is for knowledge development and sharing and the knowledge development involves different processes. Jenny Hughes has produced an analysis of different forms of knowledge based on the Welsh language. Whilst English has few words to differentiate knowledge, in Welsh there are at least six different terms for knowledge processes and six different terms for different types of knowledge, each with their own distinct meaning.
The general word for knowledge in Welsh – the translation from the English word knowledge is Gwybodaeth. Even this is not an exact translation. Gwybodaeth means something like ‘knowing-ness’, rather than knowledge.

However, the word Gwybodaeth – or knowing-ness comes in different forms defining different types of knowledge:

1. Cynnull (gwybodaeth) – to gather knowledge (as in acquisition) ‘along life’s way’
2. Cynhaeaf (gwybodaeth) – to harvest (purposefully) knowledge– or set up systems for harnessing knowledge or organise knowledge
3. Cymrodedd (gwybodaeth) – to compromise what you know to accommodate the unknown
4. Cynnau (gwybodaeth) – to light or kindle knowledge (in someone else) – can also be used to ‘share knowledge’ but implicit is that it is an active process not simply an exchange of information, which is an entirely different concept.
5. Cynllunplas (gwybodaeth) – to design (new) knowledge, paradigm shift
6. Cynyddu (gwybodaeth) – to increase or grow (existing) knowledge

I would argue that a PLE should support in some ways all of these different forms of knowing-ness and that such a list represents a useful starting point in defining what we want a PLE to be able to do.