Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

One of the problems of applications like Survey Monkey is thatit has made it just too easy to construct a survey. The result is that we are suffering from ‘surveyitis’. Furthermore, because it is so easy now to publish and publicise surveys, far too little care goes into the development and pretesting of surveys. Recently I talked about pretests at a project meeting to be met by blank faces. Why, they asked? We do not have time for that sort of thing.

Anyway I am now wary of surveys. But I am prepared to promote this survey on careers and skills, not just because it is being undertaken by my friends from Warwick University, but also because I think this is a very worthwhile piece of research. In my experience, careers are often no where near as clear cut as they seem. Often people do not progress smoothly from one job to another. And many of the skills we use are, I would guess, learnt whilst working, rather than through formal courses. But of course this is me guessing. The research should help provide some more solid data around these issues. So please do help by filling in the survey which is available in a number of different languages.

“Have you an interesting ‘story’ to tell about your career and the skills you have you developed since starting work? We are particularly interested in people who have:

• had stable careers within a single sector (such as engineering or health);
• have developed skills (such as Information Technology or communication skills) which could be applied in a number of sectors;
• had a varied work history (working in different types of jobs; different sectors; countries; not always been in full-time employment etc.);
• have worked at one time in a job that required few formal qualifications;
• have taken a job primarily to give you time or space to follow other interests;
• an interesting ‘story’ to tell that may not fit any of the above!

We were wondering if you would be prepared to help with a project we are currently undertaking?  As a team of researchers from eleven European countries, we are researching how people’s careers are changing across Europe and the different paths people take to develop the knowledge and skills they use at work.  We would be very grateful if you had the time to complete an online survey http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/eaceasurvey (available in 11 languages).  The survey may take up to 20 minutes to complete depending on the amount of detail you wish to provide. Your identity will be treated in the strictest confidence by the research team and the information you provide will be anonymised.  The results of the study will feed into a European review of how best to support work-related learning in the light of individuals’ changing patterns of career development.  If you would like to know more please do not hesitate to contact us.  We would also be grateful if you could forward this email to contacts and colleagues who you think may also be able to help.

With many thanks in advance for your help.

European Careers Research Team (see: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ier/research/current/copen/ for core team and for details of full team http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/eaceasurvey).”

I have spent the last two days putting the finishing touches to tomorrows pilot internet radio programme – the Jisc eLearning Show. The programme, which is being broadcast at 1800 UK Summer Time, 1900 Central European Time, is based on a symposium on Lifelong Learning, led by Jisc earlier this spring. Part of the programme is prerecorded and I have spoken to both policy makers and to project developers about the issues. The interviews were very interesting – indeed my major problem was choosing what not to include in the final edit for the programme.

The projects are engaging in much more than the introduction of technology and developers were keen to talk about changing pedagogic approaches and the policy implications of the work they were doing. The projects covered a wide range of applications – including the use of mobile technologies and of ePortfolios to support learners. It was encouraging to hear of the degree of engagement with learners in developing technology based projects. There was much discussion on who the ‘new learners’ were and what were their needs. The issue of change management was a recurrent theme, as was that of sustainability. Many of the projects were looking at the process of embedding developments within the every day practice of institutions. But this could raise cultural issues, especially when it came to work based learning. From a work based learning approach this was involving new partnerships with employers.

And as Tony Tool pointed out – elearning raises many issues for the funding models presently being used. Equally the development of work based learning may call into question the present policies for extending participation in higher education.

Fascinating stuff. Tomorrows programme will pick up on these issues and more with a live panel comprised of Oleg Liber from CETIS, Claire Newhouse from the Lifelong Learning Network national forum and Andrew Ravenscroft from London Metropolitan University. You can listen to the programme by going to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u . The stream will open in your MP3 player of choice. You can take part in the chat room at http://tinyurl.com/sounds08. Just add your name and press enter – no password required. And you can leave comments and questions on the Jisc elearning blog.

We will also be making the full versions of the interviews available on the elearning blog as podcasts after the show.

Another great video by Michael Wesch “summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.” Created  in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.

Thursday, 21 May sees the pilot programme of a new Jisc live internet radio programme, ‘the Elearning Show’. The programme which is to be broadcast at 1800 – 1855 UK summer time, is based on issues raised at the recent Jisc Lifelong Learning Symposium.

These issues include how university and college cultures need to change to support work based learning, who the new students are and what are their needs, how e-Portfolios can be used both for recording learning and for providing information, advice and guidance and the use of mobile technologies.

The programme considers both current and emergent practices in elearning and the development of policies to support such practice.

The programme will be presented by Graham Attwell and guests include Derek Longhurst from Foundation Degree Forward, Clive Church from Edexel, Lucy Stone from Leicester College, Tony Toole from the University of Glamorgan, Bob Bell, HE in FE consultant for the northern region, Sandra Winfield from Nottingham University and Rob Ward from the Centre for Recording Achievement

The programme will also feature a live panel. with the opportunity for listeners to skype or email their questions and comments and their will be a live chat room for listeners.

To listen to the programme go to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u This will open the LIVE radio stream in your MP3 player of choice.

You can take part in the chat room at http://tinyurl.com/sounds08. Just add your name and press enter – no password required. And you can leave comments and questions on the Jisc elearning blog.

If you like to send us questions for the panel in advance of the programme, email Graham Attwell – graham10 [at] mac [dot] com or skype to GrahamAttwell.”

Although the programme is based on developments in the UK many of the issues to be discussed on the programme will have relevance for listeners interested in the use of technologies for learning wherever they are.

For some time now, I have been saying that the present mass model of schooling is a product of teh indutrial age and is out of sync with the forms of social interaction and knowledge development of the present period. This change is an outcome of the present ‘industrial’ revolution which we are going through, based of digital technologies. This is OK for conferences. But when i have written it in journal articles and book chapters I have been challenged by editors and reviewers to provide citations for my assertion.

So I am delighted to have found, in  Norm Friesens digital except from “The future of education: The class of 1989: by Marshall McLuhan and George B Leonard published in 1967.

They say “Mass education is a child of a mechanical age. It grew up along with the production line. It reached maturity just at that historical moment when Western civilization had attained its final extreme of fragmentation and specialization, and had mastered the linear technique of stamping out products in the mass.

It was this civilization’s genius to manipulate matter, energy and human life by breaking every useful process down into its functional parts, then producing any required number of each. Just as shaped pieces of metal became components of a locomotive, human specialists become components of the great social machine.”

McLuhan and Leanard go on to say:

“In this setting, education’s task was fairly simple: decide what the social machine needs, then turn out people who match those needs. The school’s function was not so much to encourage people to keep exploring, learning and, therefore, changing throughout life as to slow and control those very processes of personal growth and change. Providing useful career or job skills was only a small part of this educational matching game.All students, perhaps more so in the humanities than the sciences and technologies, were furnished standard “bodies of knowledge,” vocabularies, concepts and ways of viewing the world. Scholarly or trade journals generally held a close check on standard perceptions in each special field.”

McLuhan recognised that education is resistant to change. However as the title implies he expected this to have changed by 1969, largely due to the impact of computers on learning. It seems that educations resistance is greater than he expected – but the ideas are alive and still relevant today. Although McLuhan recognised our tendency to reproduce previous pedagogies and social forms through new technology, he underestimated, I think, the ability of institutions to adapt new technologies as a tool for management and control, rather than for change. It has taken the advent of social software to see the dawning of McLuhan’s vision of an “environment …. packed with energy and information – diverse, insistent, compelling.”

Many thanks for Norm for provding a copy of the paper.

Just back from a twelve hour journey from Portugal and somewhat tired but thought I would give a quick blog update and trail some future posts.

Yesterday I was eating an excellent evening meal thanks to my Portuguese hosts and staring absent mindedly at the television. In truth I rarely watch television – apart from football – and so tend to be fascinated especially by adverts which seem to be the most creative side of TV production these days.

My Portuguese language is non existent yet I found myself being drawn into the story. It went something like this. Young man, student, young professional (good looking of course) is in apartment flat, dozing on sofa (too long out night before or just lazy?). Flat is in a bit of a mess – we know this because is shot in black and white! Doorbell rings. Young man vaults sofa to open door. Beautiful woman is standing there smiling. Man goes to invite her in. Woman shakes head and refuses bringing out form behind her back cleaning pad and cleaning liquid. Turns back and goes. Young man cleans apartment / flat with amazing cleaning product. Door rings again and young man opens (apartment / flat now in colour). Woman goes to come in – young man brings out from behind his back bottle of cleaning fluid.

Pretty banal – huh? But that lot all takes place in about 30 seconds and the storyline is perfectly clear without the need for any spoken text.

I can’t help thinking there are lessons for us in how we might use stories to promote learning. I wonder though how culturally specific such stories are. Coming from Wales I can understand the story and I suppose it must work in Portugal. I wonder what the cultural limits of understanding are? I also wonder if we could take a ‘chunk’ of learning and storyboard it in such a clear way?

End of todays musings. Much serious stuff to report on tomorrow – not least more thoughts on Web 2.0 and dissemination.

I am in Evora in Portugal at a two day meeting of the European funded ICONET project. ICONET builds on a previous project called Informal Competencies and their Validation (ICOVET) which developed an interview procedure for the validation of skills and competencies, a manual, and a programme for further training. ICONET is adapting and trying out the approach and tools in different sectors and different contexts in seven European countries.

The project has now only six months left to run and we have spent the afternoon discussing project dissemination. Mant of the discussions parallel recent talks in various Jisc programmes about how to ensure project sustainability and maximise the use of project outcomes following the end of external funding.

One measure is to design a range of dissemination products geared for different target audiences. New technologies can help gretaly – we havebeen looking at using video and audio as well as the more common brochures and flyers.

But the discussion today has also raised issues about what is realistic to expect from a modestly funded project. The ideas we have explored would require major changes to education systems if they were to be widely adopted. We do not have the infuence to do this. Probably the best that we can hope for is to show the possibilities of informal learning and hope that others will pick up and build on our ideas.

Regular readers will know of our slightly irreverent, somewhat wacky fun LIVE internet radio show, The Sounds of the Bazaar. We like making Sounds and form feedback we gather our listeners enjoy it too.

But, for some time now, we have been wanting to branch out and make other types of programmes. We experimented with two documentary programmes, The Dragons Den, earlier this year.

And now Jisc has commissioned a pilot of a new programme, the e-learning show. The pilot programme will be broadcast next Thursday, 21 May at 1800 UK Summer Time, 1900 Central European Time.

The following blurb provides the rundown for the show:

“Thursday, 21 May sees the pilot programme of a new Jisc live internet radio programme, ‘the Elearning Show’. The programme which is to be broadcast at 1800 – 1855 UK summer time, is based on issues raised at the recent Jisc Lifelong Learning Symposium.

These issues include how university and college cultures need to change to support work based learning, who the new students are and what are their needs, how e-Portfolios can be used both for recording learning and for providing information, advice and guidance and the use of mobile technologies.

The programme considers both current and emergent practices in elearning and the development of policies to support such practice.

The programme will be presented by Graham Attwell and guests include Derek Longhurst from Foundation Degree Forward, Clive Church from Edexel, Lucy Stone from Leicester College, Tony Toole from the University of Glamorgan, Bob Bell, HE in FE consultant for the northern region, Sandra Winfield from Nottingham University and Rob Ward from the Centre for Recording Achievement

The programme will also feature a live panel. with the opportunity for listeners to skype or email their questions and comments and their will be a live chat room for listeners.

To listen to the programme go to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u This will open the LIVE radio stream in your MP3 player of choice.

You can take part in the chat room at http://tinyurl.com/sounds08. Just add your name and press enter – no password required.

If you like to send us questions for the panel in advance of the programme, email Graham Attwell – graham10 [at] mac [dot] com or skype to GrahamAttwell.”

Although the programme is based on developments in the UK many of the issues to be discuassed on the programme will have relevance for listeners interested in the use of technologies for learning wherever they are.

And if you are missing the old Sounds of the Bazaar, don’t worry, we haven’t gone away. The next programme planned in that series will be broadcast live from the ProLearn european Summer School in Slovakia in the first week of June. Further details as soon as we can agree on a timeslot for the programme.

The plan is to get the student perspective, find out what assessment is carried out and how the results benefit them. I have students who sat through literacy screening in September and still haven’t had the follow up support they need 8 months later. Maybe I work for a particularly bad example, maybe initial assessment is just another hoop to jump through, but why bother collecting the data if you’re not going to use it for the benefit of your students?

If I use the Ofsted criteria as a guide, what questions should I be asking the students?

Specialist staff? Who carries out the assessment? Course lecturer, personal tutor, specialist, online, self assessment?

Appropriate time? Start of the course? Interview?

Starting point, learning plan? Is it relevant, are the targets attainable, is it updated regularly?

Screening for literacy/numeracy?

Results, feedback?

Appropriate support?

What tools already exist for evaluating an initial assessment policy? This one from QIA helps staff to discuss initial assessment; http://excellence.qia.org.uk/media/attachments/108534/Initial-Assessment-Tool-v6.pdf

I’m off to play around with surveymonkey.com

The majority of available literature on the topic of initial assessment consists of policy documents aimed at providers of ESOL and Basic Skills education. There have been a number of government initiatives in the UK aimed at improving standards in literacy and numeracy.

The QCA says schools with half decent admissions procedures are the ones which will adequately identify support needs;  http://www.qca.org.uk/qca_7143.aspx

Ofsted www.excellencegateway.org.uk recommends “STL” as example of good practice… so off I went to Google STL; http://www.stltraining.co.uk/ and then emailed someone from STL to enquire about their assessment policy. One month on and I’ve heard nothing.

Anyway, the general guidance from Ofsted is that good practice in initial assessment must have;

• Team approach to support
• Detailed initial assessment
• ILPs

What do their inspectors look out for?…

http://excellence.qia.org.uk/page.aspx?o=11F8361F-F327-4D61-BF27-43190802FECD

So now we know.