Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

Finally got around to finishing the survey last week, tried it out on my sisters and a student friend (thanks all) who suggested a few tweaks to the language.

The final version is here.

Now I’ve got to get it to as many students in the UK as possible. Hope they don’t mind breaking from revision for five minutes!

Posted in Initial assessment; the student experience

This presentation picks up on a number of my interests. I have always related the forms of our educational systems and institutions to different phases in economic and social development. Furthermore, I am fascinated by the potential of mobile devices to support context based learning.

John Cook presents a project providing a contextualised, social and historical account of urban education, focusing on systems and beliefs that contribute to the construction of the surrounding discourses.

Another aim of this project is to scaffold the trainee teachers’ understanding of what is possible with mobile learning in terms of field trips.

I go through periods of having little new to say about Personal Learning Environments and times with many new ideas. I am at the moment in one of the latter periods – inspired by so many interesting talks at the European Technology Enhanced Summer School last week and at over the weekend at a meeting of the Mature-IP project partnership.

Here are a few of the things I have been thinking about (and will write about over the next two weeks):

• the emergence of some consensus about a mash up (Mupples) approach to PLE development based on widgets
• the relationship between (informal) learning and knowledge development and maturing within organisations
• The relationship between individual learning through a PLE and organisational learning
• the idea of bricolage as the basis of an emerging pedagogic theory of learning outside the institutions
• the potential for a mobile device based PLE (code named a WOMBLE – Work and Mobile Learning Environments)
• The digital identity of learners expressed through a PLE
• the idea of appropriation (linked to bricolage) of software and applications for use for learning
• the potential of Google Wave as a platform for a PLE

Anyone care to add to this list?

I am back from the European Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning. The summer school, which is targeted at PhD students and is co-organised by a number of European research projects and networks. was held near Terchova in the Slovakian mountains. It is a very beautiful area. Unfortunately it was wet and cold for the whole week. Worse the network connection was insufficient for 90 people and only skype worked with any degree of reliability.

Ok, these problems happen. But what of the summer school itself? Here are comments from students at the summer school:

“I didn’t want to bonded with lecturers …I would prefer to meet ‘relevant’ people, to have discussions, to know at least what today’s lecture is about.  Interesting things are mostly between lectures”.

“Bar Camp Format”
“Work during workshops, not just listen activities”
“ Get Summer School participants (after the selection period) involved in the organisation of the Summer School programme”
“ Not too much aggressive advertisement & self-appraisal of projects”
“why so much focus on projects rather than areas of research?”
“Presenters should have better presentation skills”
“more practical sessions”
“Lecturers & students F2F and get advice on PhD topic”
“Take account of cultures – religions & dietary requirements: why ask if there are dietary requirements and fail to offer choice or take account of the responses to the questions asked”
“Use less traditional approach.  Instead of a 50 min lecture & a 10 min discussion: the lecture does a 10min and the remainder discussions.  Maybe having 2/3 lectures and then splitting into groups to discuss specific issues”
“More online activities leading to the summer school week”
“Internet connection is a must”
“The organisers should know the topic of all PhDs. The could form groups of interest with a competent advisor so that they can discuss & work on the topics”
“Voice for the novice researchers”
“More from an educational background”
“It seems that we are mostly IT and some of us are education oriented, but we have an agenda for ‘computer science for educators’ or ‘education for IT people’ – that is confusing!’
“Round table discussions. E.g. meet with 6 people for 15 mins & then switch & mix-up again”
“Equality between lecturers & students.  Instead of ‘traditional’ lecture styles, the sessions could be improved by actually using TEL”
“A session with PhD students only – like the one we had on the first day”
“More ‘democratic’ choice of topics for the lectures/workshops”
“A presentation should be 10 slides, 20 mins, 30 as a min font size”
“Workshop on how to create posters”
“There should be a meeting to get to know each other at the beginning &  topic outlines from students”
“Can we control/select the topics of classes?”
“It would be interesting to have game-based learning sessions”
“Lectures & projects in short form”

Overall, students were critical of the summer school. Whilst talking about the uses of technology and new forms of pedagogy, the summer school was organised in a somewhat old fashioned didactic format. There was a sharp distinction between lectures and students (the lecturers even were allocated better bedrooms in the hotel!) and each morning was given over to a series of one hour lectures. Many of the afternoon workshops tended to be lecture like in format with limited interactivity and limited opportunities for discussion between participants. And whilst there were a number of interesting presentations, as the feedback suggests, it seemed that the agenda or programme for the summer school had been determined by offering slots of the sponsoring projects, rather than being based around the needs of the participants. The general philosophy appeared to be one of knowledge transmission, with PhD students supposed to learn through listening to the views of experts (this was sometimes a little surreal as we talked of moves from an expert model to crowd sourcing and knowledge exchange through Web 2.0).

Nevertheless, a free pool table, the great Slovakian beer and so many talented people guaranteed many fascinating conversations. A big hullo to Maria, Mike, Ashley, Chris, John, Ricardo, Eva, Carl, Zina and everyone else. Any time you fancy a game of pool, juts give me a shout.

Apologies for the lack of posts on this site in the last few days. The reason will become apparent soon. I am in Terchova in Slovakia at the European Association of Technology Enhanced Learning (EATEL) summer school. This is the fourth of the annual summer schools, sponsored by the different EU funded research projects on Technology Enhanced Learning, and targeted primarily at Doctoral students. There are nearly 100 of us here from most of the EU members states and from further afield.
The reason for the lack of posts is not lack of ideas,  far from it. The simple issue is that we have very limited bandwidth. There is a wireless network which works perfectly well – as long as no more than about 10 people try to access it at once. For a summer school on technology enhanced learning this does provide a problem. But at least it has forced me to think about the issues faced by those without easy access to the internet. We appear to get windows when we can get online. I have found the best time is when everyone is eating!
Now for a little about the content and process of the summer school. Personal Learning environments are a big issue, with five or six sessions around PLEs. There is little agreement on the definition of a PlE, although I sometimes wonder of we are getting to hung up trying to define things. There is a clear difference between those of us who see a PLE fundamentally as a pedagogic approach to learning and those who view a PLE in terms of technology platforms and applications. There also seems to be a difference between some who are focusing on the personalisation of learning applications, content and processes and those who see PLE as fundamentally owned by learners. However, at least between the different European projects concerned with PLEs, there seems to be a growing consensus that the Mask up PLE (Mupples) approach, based on widgets, provides a perspective to flexible and user centred development fo PLE tools and functionality.
There has also been a number fo discussions around recommender systems. At a technical level recommenders systems would appear feasible to develop and implement. The problem is for what purposes! Are they an answer looking for a problem.
There have been constant references to leaner styles with a desire to be able to personalise everything – form platform to content to learning processes to take account of different learnings styles. However, there also seems little understanding of what learning styles are, or of the literature and research that refutes learnings styles theory.
And that brings me to a bigger issue. Many of the researchers at the summer school have a background in computer studies or in programming. Of course they all have an interest in learning – or presumably they would not be here. But the understanding of pedagogy is limited. They tend to take the present educational and institutional systems as am immutable fact. There are also a number fo us here who come form an education or pedagogic background. Yet the interchange between our different perspective is problematic. We are not yet really talking the same language, neither do we have adequate translation tools.
Perhaps one of the answers lies in the format of the summer school. The format is somewhat traditional, with two or three guest lectures a year and four or five workshops, in two parallel sessions. To overcome the divide between pedagogists and educationalists probably requires amore inetractice approach and concious design to enhance interdisciplinarity and the exchange of ideas and c0mpetcnes between those with different specialisms. I am not convinced that forma lectures lake the most fo the wonderful learning opportunities present in such an intensive and multi cultural event.
Furthermore, many of the presenters are struggling, especially in planning and managing workshops. I wonder, given that it is a requirement for doctoral students to participate in presentations and workshops, if we should not be giving them more support and even training in this. This requires real competences, competences which are not necessarily acquired informally through being a researcher.