Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

I am off to the JTEL Winter School on Advanced Learning Technologies 2010 It was quite a surprise to have received a scholarship, and quite short notice too. I can’t believe it’s already about to start! WOW I am excited about the programme. It seems to be quite hands-on. I was asked to create a three minute presentation [...]

A quick blogsquat from Jenny Hughes….

I have been fascinated by the Yellow Arrow project and my mind is working overtime thinking of of ways it could be extended from art to education.

For those of you who have not come across it yet, the Yellow Arrow project is a global public art project that started in New York and is now an underground movement that has spread to over 450 cities in 35 countries.

Basically, you download a yellow arrow sticker from the project website and stick it somewhere public. If someone sees the sticker, they can text the code number on it to a particular telephone number and will immediately receive a text back with a message left by the person who put the sticker there.

So the yellow arrow basically means ‘there’s more here: a hidden detail, a funny story, a memory or a crazy experience.’ Each arrow links digital content to a specific location using the mobile phone.

If you want more info, just go to http://yellowarrow.net/v3/

The yellow arrow messages range from personal reflection to concrete information about, for example, the history of the building the arrow is stuck on. They sort of cross the divide between tourism and art.

Now I got interested in the idea during the Taccle training courses and tried out a variation on this using a commercial application, which was actually nothing to do with the Yellow Arrow project. (For details of this see, my previous post http://www.pontydysgu.org/2009/11/25-practical-ideas-for-using-mobile-phones-in-the-classroom/ ) I stumbled on the Yellow Arrow idea when I was browsing around for ideas on getting teachers to explore mobile technologies.

It seems to me that there are endless possibilities for developing ‘Yellow Arrow Learning. – The text messages could have an explicit learning content.

• The arrows could be coded by subject area or topic.
• Using a Google maps mash up you could design learning trails.
• The telephone number to ring could be linked to our own server. So, for example, we could add urls to You Tube or Flickr
• You could get whole communities involved – why not a local town (like Pontypridd) becoming a Yellow Arrow Learning Community?
• Get all the schools involved as well as local industry. So a yellow arrow stuck on the brickworks could lead to a video of bricks being made.
• Why not extend the public domain yellow arrows to the inside / private domain as well – yellow arrow work based learning?

The possibilities seem endless. The technology is simple. It might, in the future be upgraded to augmented reality applications or use QR instead of phone numbers – or both.

Graham and I are both interested in doing some work to progress some of these ideas and possibly putting in a funding application or working with someone else who wants to. It could be quite an edgy project if we can get a really creative team together. If any of you are interested and have some ideas, please get in touch.

The EUROPEAN MEDIA ART FESTIVAL OSNABRUECK will take place over 21 – 25 April 2010 (the exhibition will be held over 21 April – 24 May 2010). Unfortunately there is an overlap with the ARTECH 2010 conference on digital arts to be held over 22-23 April in Guimarães, Portugal. However, here is the information about the festival 2010:

“The 23rd European Media Art Festival arouses great international interest. Once again, there is a great deal of international interest in this year’s Media Art Festival in Osnabrück. Over 2100 artists from every corner of the globe have sent in films, videos and installations. The entries were sent from countries such as Mexico, South Korea, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and France. Entries were received from a total of 60 different countries, whereby Germany, the USA and Great Britain are most strongly represented. However, there are also works from Afghanistan, Palestine and the Arab Emirates, as well as from Russia, the Czech Republic and Argentina.

This year, the European Media Art Festival (EMAF) is co-operating at the national level with Ruhr.2010, as part of the “National Heroes – German Cities of Culture” programme. This project was devised to integrate the cities that competed against one another nationally for the title of the European Capital of Culture. In other words, the former rivals have now become partners which, as a co-operation of cities, are engaging in the programme of the Capital of Culture RUHR.2010.

The festival also maintains good contacts to other European countries. For instance, an additional new award will be presented at this year’s EMAF: the “Live2011.com Grand Prix Event Award @ EMAF 2010″. This
award, which is worth 1500 euros, is part of the overall competition “Live2011.com Grand Prix”, announced by the European City of Culture 2011, Turku in Finland.

Another national co-operative project is currently in the decisive phase: MEDIA ART BASE. In collaboration with the documenta archive in Kassel and the Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe, an online database for archiving major international media art works will be completed by 2011. This project receives major funding from the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

In addition, the EMAF has gained membership to two European support networks, both of which are used by the EU to support the production of artistic projects via its cultural programme. On the initiative of the EMAF, a new multimedia artwork by the internationally renowned artist Candice Breitz is facilitated with the MOVING STORIES project.
Also, the EMAF heads the co-operation TRANSIT, in which art institutions from Germany, France, Belgium, England, the Netherlands, Poland and Lithuania collaborate. Within TRANSIT, young talented artists hope to create and present their new works by 2011, and to exhibit them in Osnabrück.”

Please join us at: facebook, twitter, flickr, vimeo.

Concept and directors board: Hermann Nöring, Alfred Rotert, Ralf Sausmikat

// SPONSORS
nordmedia – Die Mediengesellschaft Niedersachsen/Bremen mbH
Stadt Osnabrueck
Auswaertiges Amt, Berlin
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Berlin
EU Funding EFRE
as well as donations from further sponsors.

Contact/Address/Postal:

European Media Art Festival
Lohstrasse 45 a,
D-49074 Osnabrueck

phone +49 (0) 5 41 – 2 16 58,
fax +49 (0) 5 41 – 2 83 27,
mail: info(at)emaf.de
www.emaf.de

via EMAF

More thoughts on competence – mostly in my attempts to develop an idea of how mobile devices could be used for learning in the workplace – and in particular for practice based and informal learning.

In my last post on this subject I pointed to definitions of competence from German research seeing the main aim of the development of competence is the ‘formation of personality structures with a view to coping with the requirements of change within the process of transformation and the further evolution of economic and social life.’

This definition is counter-posed to the more narrow and functionalist views of competence more common in the UK and USA research and education and training systems.

In this post I want to revisit earlier research work in Germany by Gerald Heidegger and Felix Rauner who looked at occupational profiles. Occupational profiles are in effect groups of competencies based on individual occupations. In Germany there are over 360 officially recognised occupations.

Heidegger and Rauner  were commissioned by the Government of Rhineland Westphalia to write a Gutachten (policy advice) on the future reform and modernisation of the German Dual System for apprenticeship training.

They recommended less and broader occupational profiles and, if my memory is right, the idea of wandering occupational profiles. By this term they were looking to map the boundaries between different occupations and to recognise where competences from one occupation overlapped with that of another. Such overlaps could form the basis for boundary crossing and for moving from one occupation to another.

Heidegger and Rauner’s work was grounded in an understanding of the interplay between education, work organisation and technology. They were particularly focused on the idea of work process knowledge –  applied and practice based knowledge in the workplace. This was once more predicated on an idea of competence in which the worker would make conscious choices of the best actions to undertake in any particular situation (rather than the approach to competences in the UK which assumes there is always a ‘right way’ to do something).

Per Erik Ellstroem from Sweden has put forward the idea of Developmental Competence – the capacity of the individual to acquire and demonstrate the capacity to act on a task  and the wider work environment in order to adapt, act and shape (design) it.

This is based on the pedagogic idea of sense making and meaning making through exploring, questioning and transcending traditional work structures and procedures. In a similar vein, Rauner has come up with the idea of holistic work tasks, based on the idea that a worker should understand the totality of the work process they are involved in. He has proposed collaboration between small companies to ensure broad based training for apprentices.

One of the major problems within the German apprenticeship training system (which accounts for over half of the age cohort leaving school each year) is lack of co-ordination between the school and company based parts of the training. However, a mobile based Personal Learning Environment could allow apprentices to control their own learning and sense making through linking up practical tasks in the workplace to the more theory based school learning.  Informal and work based learning could potentially be mapped against competences with such a system.

(References to follow)

Hello everyone,

My name is Ilona Buchem and I will be writing here on how ICT is changing educational sciences and education research today. I titled this blog “Paradygmat” which is a Polish word for “paradigm”.  With Pontydysgu aiming at enhancing diversity and multilingualism, I will be writing here in Polish, my mother tongue. I hope that those of you, who can’t understand it, will be able to do so with the help of online translation services.

But let’s get back to the term “paradigm”. Based on the philosophy of Thomas Kuhn, “paradigm” refers to a set of practices, such as methods of observation and interpretation, which define a scientific discipline during a particular period of time. When limitations of basic assumptions in a particular field are recognized, a paradigm shift occurs. The existing paradigm is enlarged and frontiers of knowledge are pushed forward. For example, the printing press, Gutenberg’s invention and the making of books changed the culture and affected the scientific revolution. Similarly, information and communication technologies, such as social media or mobile devices, are driving a new paradigm shift today.

So in this blog, I would like to focus on how educational sciences are shifting towards more openness, interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration, discourse beyond traditional boarders, stronger interactions with practice etc. I would like to discuss with you the impact of scientific peer online communities, interdisciplinary research, collaborative scientific writing, new practices and formats of conferences and symposia, to name a few.

I am looking forward to discussing these interesting topics with speakers of Polish and speakers of other languages! Hope we will enjoy it and learn from each other!

Greetings,

Ilona Buchem

A quick post about mobile devices and work based learning – which I know I have been going on about a lot lately.

So far most of the work on mobile learning at a practical level seems to me to fit into four categories:

• applications designed to provide information for students – about their courses, lecture times, venues, transport information, buildings etc.
• what might be called learning objects – small apps designed to support learning about a particular topic or issue – often using multi media
• apps or projects aiming to improve communication between learners or between learners and teachers
• information – revision guides etc. designing to promote mobile access to resources

There is nothing wrong about any of these and they all may be useful in pushing mobile learning forward. But I think they may fail to really extend forward ideas about tecahing and learning 0 they are all essentially repackaging existing elearning applications for mobile devices.

The big potential I see for mobile devices is in their affordances of being always on – or almost always on, in the fact that we already accept the idea of the frequent but sporadic use of the devices for all kinds of activities such as taking photos and messaging – as well as making telephone calls – and that they are portable.

in other words – taking learning support to areas it has not been taken to before. And prime amongst these is teh workplace. It is little coincidence that many of the main take-up areas for elearning are for those occupations which involve regular use of computers e.g in ICT occupations, in marketing and management etc. Ans one of the main issues in developing elearning for vocational or occupational learning is the contextual nature of such learning and the high cost of producing specific learnng materials for relatively low numbers of learners. Vocational students often wish for learning materials to be in their own language, thus exacerbating the problem of small numbers of users for specific occupations.

It is also interesting to note that despite many researchers pointing to the importance of reflection as a key pedagogic tool, there has been limited pedagogic and technical development to facilitate such an approach.

The use of mobile devices can overcome this. They can be used in specific contexts of location, tasks, experince, colleagues and allow ready means of reflection through the use of photographs, video, text and audio.

If linked up to a server based ‘portfolio’ this could form an essential part of a Personal Learning Environment. Furthermore the learning materials become the entire work environment, rather than custom built applications. And tools such as Google Goggles could easily be incorporated (although I have to say it seems more alphe than beta ot me – I havent managed to get it to recognise a single object so far!).

I am mush taken with a free Android Ap called Ontheroad. It doesn’t do much. It is designed its ays for you to share your adventures on the road You have to set up a free account on a web site. You can publish active trips (I am going to try to make one this week). You can add articles including your position by GPS, you can add text, multimedia, dates and choose which trip to publish it to though the telephone network or by SMS. You can browse existing articles and look at comments. You can add media including photos already on your gallery. Or you can record a video (audio support seems limited).

And it is all synced through a server. It would not take much to refocus this app to a Learning Journey, rather than a road trip. And it could be incredibly powerful in terms of work based learning.

So I do not see a great technical challenge. the bigger challenge is in developing a pedagogic approach which incorporates informal learning in the workplace and such a portfolio based on practice within formal approaches ot education and training.

If you are interested in working with me to develop these technologies and ideas please get in touch.

I am surprised that there has not been more discussion of the UK Open University’s decison to sign up to Google Education for cloud computing services.

On his blog Niall Sclater says:

“In our first foray into cloud computing, Google will be hosting for our students:

• email (gmail)
• contacts
• instant messaging and presence
• calendar
• document creation, storage and sharing
• websites”

Interestingly, The OU, the UK’s largest univeristy, will not at the moment be giving staff access ot the system, presumably becuase of concerns over security and confidentiality.

Niall explains the reasons for the decision :

“Growing numbers of institutions are now adopting cloud-based systems such as Google Apps for Education, particularly in the US. The arguments for hosting your own student email are becoming increasingly weak when it can be done externally for free, or at least much more cheaply. Google will provide a service level agreement with higher levels of availability than we could achieve ourselves. In addition there are other services included such as instant messaging that we don’t currently provide to students but could help them to connect more with each other.”

However the decision has interesting implications for pedgogic approaches. Niall says:

“These systems will increasingly start to compete with some of the features of learning management systems / virtual learning environments such as Moodle and Blackboard. They provide a higher level of individual control for students and potentially remove some of the administrative burden from the university. …

Another area for investigation is the use of Google Apps as an eportfolio system. Our initial research has shown that it would work for some of the key aspects of eportfolio provision such as the storage of documents under the control of the user, the exporting of these so they can be taken with them through life, and the creation of templates for the collection of structured data for a variety of purposes. We still need to work out how we can freeze or export eportfolio content where it is being for formal assessment.”

In a comment on the blog, Tim Hunt, also from the Open University, says:

“The VLE is the University’s space where it publishes its courses, and students come to study that material and perform some course-specific activities.

Google tools / ePortfolio / PLE / student’s own laptop are the student’s spaces for keeping and managing their learning.

In a traditional bricks a and mortar, chalk and talk setting, the VLE is the lecture room and labs; and Google tools are the student’s room in the hall of residence, or possibly their leaver-arch file.

I think it is clear that you need both types of space, and that they complement each other. However, there are some activities that could take place in either space.”

Manish Malik from Portsmouth University, which is already giving access to Google cloud services to all students, tries to distinguish between PLEs, VLEs, loosely coupled applications and what he calls a “CLE or Cloud Learning Environment”

” The cloud can be seen as one big autonomous system not owned by any educational institution. Let the Academics or Learners be the users, of some cloud based services, who all equally share the privelages like control, choice, sharing of content etc on these services. Then this is different from a PLE, a VLE and a PTE. For example Google Apps for universities is hosted on the cloud, not fully controlled by any educational institution and certainly not owned by one. The tools on it are to a great extent academic or learner controlled. Each “Google Site”, for example, can be owned by an academic or a Learner and both users be given the same rights/control by one another (depending on who creates first). Likewise Google Docs can be owned and shared between learners themselves or learners and academics under their own control.

This gives all parties the same rights on same set of tools. This clearly has potential to enable and facilitate both formal and informal learning for the learner. Both the academic and the learner are free to use the tools the way they wanted and share and collaborate with anyone they wanted.”

I think Malik is wrong is distinguishing between PLEs and CLEs (and to be honest, we really need just to advance our understandings of PLEs, rather than invent yet more acrobyms and terminology). If we go back to the blog entry which strated it all – Scott Wilson’s “The Future VLE?”, it was always clear that a PLE would include different third party services  (even though cloud computing was not a term invented then as far as I know).

However, there are a number of interesting issues raised by the move towards cloud services for students.

Firstly, the services provided by Google make it very easy for s student to develop their own PLE. One of the long running concerns about PLEs has been whether or not all students have the knowledge and skills with technology to develop their PLE. This may overcome such concerns. Furthermore, in a podcast interview with Niall I made three years ago, he expressed the concern that university computer services had a duty to provide support for all applications a university was using for tecahing and learning. If PLEs were to be introduced he argued, this would be impossible due to the very diversity of different platforms and applications. Presumably, the deal with Google overcomes that issue.

Of course it is all to easy to see Google as the new evil empire, taking over education. But unless the nature of the deal between universities totally ties down systems, it should be relatively easy to integrate third party services with the Google apps, at least for someone with reasonable digital skills. And although Niall Sclater refers to ePortoflios, I see little difference in the way this is developing to a PLE.

Of course, there are worries about trusting a PLE to third party commercial companies. But data is not locked down on Google in the way it is on platforms like Facebook. it should be relatively simple for a learner to keep copies of important work and data on their own computers (and indeed to update those copies when they change computers).

Interesting, from my present interests, it  should be relatively simple to integrate Google apps with the Android platform, this making mobile learning much cimpler (ignoring of course the problems with cross paltform use).

Of course the proof will be in the use. Will teachers start moving to Google apps rather than use the Open Univeristiy’s Moodle platform? Will learners develop their own PLEs? How will the Google apps integrate with univeristy services and applications. Will data be secure and will Google continue to support student PLEs even after they have left university: Is this just a new form of lockin? And how reliable are Google services? Do the moves by Portsmouth and the Open University herald a large scale shift by educational institutions to cloud services?

Most of all – will the use of these services provide new pedagogic affordances which will lead to changing practices in teaching and learning? Tims will tell.

I found this video from YouTube on Will Richardson’s blog. Will asks:

If at some point in the fairly near future just about every high school kid is going to have a device that connects to the Internet, how much longer can we ask them to stuff it in their lockers at the beginning of the day?

How are we going to have to rethink the idea that we have to provide our kids a connection? Can we even somewhat get our brains around the idea of letting them use their own?

At what point do we get out of the business of troubleshooting and fixing technology? Isn’t “fixing your own stuff” a 21st Century skill?

How are we helping our teachers understand the potentials of phones and all of these shifts in general?

I was idly wasting time reading my twitter stream and it occurred to me that I seem to be getting less tweets these days. So I twittered out “Is it my impression or do i get less tweets these days. Following more people so are they just tweeting less?: And in the wonderful way that twitter works back came a reply from @paulbrichardson: “I am getting fewer tweets too. But there is more substance to them – usually expressing or referencing an idea..” This was quickly followed up by “Worried that my last tweet points to an attempt at a taxonomy of tweets. I am definitely not going there though…” And of course @tmartinowen couldn’t resist the bait: “here is a totally unsubstantial tweet – just to keep the classification going – or does the parenthesis give it substance?”

Nor would I wish to risk a classification. But there do seem to be a few things going on in the way we are using twitter (or at least the people I follow). There are far less of the straight forward “good morning Twitterverse” or “had a great lunch” or “tired and going to bed now” type tweets. u suspect this was a leftover from the Facebook status update days (in the same way few people are bothering to update their skype status nowadays). Have we simply become bored with our own mundane lives?

And Paul is right – most of the tweets I receive do seem to be on points of substance and many point to a resource. This may be due to the increasing use of sophisticated Twitter clients and to cross application linking through the API (e.g posting Diego links to twitter). Twitter is becoming a rich repository of links to resources. However discovery remains problematic and harvesting is tricky due to lack of longevity.

This is all to the good. But I am increasingly missing the social nature of Twitter which also seems to be on the wane. We are using twitter for reporting and shouting out but does it still retain the social and collaborative nature of its early days? Of course there remain the odd maverick – @johnpopham’s #uktrains series is strangely compulsive.

A further trend is to increase the ability of machines to read twitter through hash tag taxonomies. As reported in the ReadWriteWeb a group of hackers ” in collaboration with Project EPIC, developed a new syntax to make it easier for computers to read tweets from areas that are affected by a disaster. If adopted widely, this new hashtag-based syntax will make it easier to automatically extract data about locations or the status of a road or person.”

But as comments on the blog pointed out such taxonomies are far from people friendly. is there a trade off between machine readable functionality and human and social uses of media?

Twitter is an interesting platform because of the wide affordances in its social use. The changing ways in which we are using Twitter may point to the evolution of the use of wider social media in the future.

Anyway – time to send a tweet announcing this post

For the Euronet PBL project we have been working on blogposts and podcasts updating the progress of the project. You can find the two podcasts below but if you are particularly interesting you can find the blogposts and more details about the project on the Euronet PBL website.

The first podacst is with me and Masriam Bukit from the Indonesia University of Education an interested party.

The second is with Ludger Deitmer from ITB which is the German partner on the project.