Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

clipped from elearningstuff.net ALT-C 2010 in Nottingham for me was as much about the formal learning as it was about the social learning. An opportunity to learn both in formal and informal social settings. I was concerned slightly that the use of Twitter by certain people and FALT would be slightly cliquey. However no matter how cliquey people think it is, it is a relatively open clique. This year it was very easy to join in conversations using Twitter and then meet up socially, quite a few people I know has never been part of the ALT-C family (first time at the conference) and are now probably part of the clique.

Much of the publicity about cutbacks in public spending in education in the UK have focused on the limitations in student numbers in universities and on the axing of the school building programme.

However, perhaps the most dramatic affect to date is being felt by the Careers Service, usually called Connexions. The Unison trade union have produced a summary of what is going on and it does not make for pretty reading.

Here are a few examples drawn from their survey.

In Luton, trade unions and employees are now being consulted on the Connexions proposals which involves the reduction of 12 full time posts, nine of which are currently filled; early cancellation of contracts with some voluntary sector providers; and reduction in the budget available for resources and other services to support work with young people.

In Thurrock, at least £304k cut from Connexions budget in year with approximately 10 jobs going, leading to reduced time available to provide a universal Information, Advice and Guidance service and track young people so as to support them into Employment, Education and Training

In Norfolk the cuts are more dramatic. “We are losing the Connexions brand and becoming guidance advisers, we are threatened with a 50% reduction in funding and the loss of 65WTE jobs. PA jobs are being cut and the structure for services vastly pared down impacting on delivery. Centres are being closed down so YPs have no access. Guidance will be electronic and phone based and two tiers of working are being delivered – targeted and tailored, suggesting some grading differential in pay too. No LDD PAs or casework managers.”

Similarly in Northamptonshire. “The whole Company, numbering 175, has been placed at risk of redundancy. The in-year cut to the Connexions service is £1.3 million out of a budget of £5.4 million, which will require a 40% reduction in the second half of the year to end of March.”

And so it goes on. Meanwhile the government blathers on hypocritically about its commitment to a universal and high quality careers service. Indeed, the Conservative Government in their manifesto proposed a new all-age careers service. At the Institute of Careers Guidance conference (November 2009) then shadow education minister David Willetts stated that he recognised the critical importance of high quality, impartial, universally available careers information and advice and of the economic and social benefits these bring

Sadly few outside the careers services realise what is going on. But everyone in education in the UK should be watching. For what is happening to the careers service today is a blueprint for what may happen to schools, colleges and universities tomorrow.

I wrote in a previous post that there was a welcome move at the Advanced Learning Technologies Conference in Nottingham this year, away from a focus on technologies towards looking at social and pedagogic issues connected with Technology Enhanced Learning. One session that epitomised this change was ‘New bottles, old wine? A debate on the ethics of educational interventions in popular digital technologies.’

As the abstract for the session pointed out such spaces are outside the control and rules of educational institutions and allow “places and modes that people can inhabit, where communities can form and disband, where ideas, images and information can be produced, stored, shared, tagged, discussed, transmitted and consumed and where diverse expectations have developed about language, humour, posture, taste, fashion, etiquette and behaviour.”

The speakers took different stances towards these issues. Writing before the session Steve Wheeler gave a précis of what the speakers would cover.

Frances Bell will identify private/public as complex reflexive student practice in personal and education use of social media, e.g. Youtube (Lange, 2007) and explore the role of the educator in students’ ethical development.
Andy Black will expose the issues relating to the transnational use of technologies approaches where users will have access to very different levels of technology and even if technology used is the same or similar the way it is deployed is culturally different. The concept is that these differences will decline or morph over time to become transnational & transcultural, resulting in usage that is woven into a global cultural thread.
Mark Childs will raise some of the ethical issues that influence creating learning activities in immersive virtual worlds and offer viewpoints to be debated on the potential responses to students’ unease concerning the experience, cultures and perceptions of virtual worlds, the appropriate balance between authenticity and pseudonymity in virtual worlds and the responsibilities of teachers with respect to protecting those within virtual worlds from the impact of our teaching within them.
Karl Royle will argue that the ethical considerations of gaming are inherently bounded and regulated by the inherent rules of ‘the game’ and that as such are disposed to self regulation, and are about trying to do good or at least minimise harm in achieving a win state.
John Traxler will argue that the universal experience of mobility and connectedness in our societies is leading to transient, ephemeral and overlapping communities each with its own ethics; there are no longer grand narratives of ethics, only partial and local expressions of values and preferences. It’s new wine, new bottles, new drinkers
Steve Wheeler will take a cognitive stance to the issue of ethics in emerging digital environment research. He will hold that users interact and represent themselves in different ways depending on environment and context, switching between identities. Steve will argue that new technologies and tools present new affordances and expectations, and therefore require new approaches.

All very good. these are issues that urgently need exploring. Yet I did not feel the session really lived up to its potential – maybe because the topic is so important and so broad. Perhaps only Karl Royle moved towards exploring new territory, at least for me.

One of the difficulties, I think, is in relating immediate practices and controversies, for example the ongoing arguments over Facebook’s ownership and permissions regime, to wider social and ethical issues.

What might those issues be? Power and control has to be near the top of any list. How is the use of digital technologies changing, reinforcing or breaking down traditional power structures and relationship in education?  And how is the use of digital technologies impacting on traditional class biases in education? More fundamentally, how does our uses of technology impact on rights to education? Do people have a universal right? If so, can we subvert technology to provide universal technology. And of course there are many ethical issues around who provides education – should the state have a duty to provide free or affordable education? Should it have a monopoly on such provision? Should private social software providers be regulated? If so by who? And who makes up the rules and in whose interests?

What of the implications for knowledge development, knowledge structures and knowledge sharing. Surely one of the biggest ethical issues today is attempts to privatise knowledge through copyright legislation.

These are just a few … feel free to add your ideas in the comments. I know the speakers at this inaugural session are planning to take the debate on the road and look forward to the next iteration. But I still wonder how to approach the whole issue of ethics and how to link up day to day practices and issues with larger societal concerns.

I am still interested in experimenting with different formats for conference presentations. Of course the call for contributions and formats for different conferences will limit the possibilities (as often does the design of the conference environment). The European Conference on Educational Research offers the possibility for workshops but, in may experience, there are very few workshops and all too often it is difficult to tell the difference between a paper sessions and a workshop sessions.

This year I submitted a proposal for a workshop around the G8WAY project on educational transitions. This was the proposal:

” A major characteristic of European societies is the rapidly growing differentiation of educational pathways, opportunities and biographies. This increase in complexity  requires great effort from learners into initiative taking, creativity, problem solving, risk assessment and decision taking. Through the past years various structures have been developed in order to support students in mastering educational transition. However they have been often formulated in an institutional perspective, discounting learners’ experience and creativity skills as well as new opportunities of technology enhanced learning.

The research workshop is based on the European Commission funded G8WAY project. G8WAY is based on the idea, that the growing availability of web 2.0 tools allows for bridging this gap through learner centred and connective approaches, with a chance to more effectively manage educational transition. Thus, G8WAY is developing web 2.0 enhanced learning environments, which will enable learners to reflect and develop creativity potentials and transitional skills in the light of self and others’ learning experience, made visible through a variety of media sets and PLE tools, each of them designed to meet the requirements of transition envisaged, and all of which are mapped into one single pedagogy framework.

G8WAY is producing 3 transition scenarios:

1. school to work and
2. general to higher education.
3. Higher education to work

For each of the scenarios a problem oriented concept and case based reasoning method will be developed and embedded into a web 2.0 learning environment to facilitate reflection, case based reasoning and experimental learning on self and other’s learning experience across different educational contexts and towards the development of transitional skills. To this purpose G8WAY will develop web 2.0 learning environments combining a variety of media sets and ICT enhanced learning tools, which are connected through a single pedagogy framework.

The research workshop is intended to form an active part of the G8WAY project, allowing connection and input from the wider educational research community to the projects work and outcomes.

This will involve collaborative exploration of a series of interlinked issues:

• What are the issues in transitions between education institutions and between education and work
• What competences are required to deal with transitions
• How can these competences be acquired
• How can informal learning be facilitated to bridge scaffold transition processes
• How can thinking & reflection, conversation & interaction, experience & activity or evidence & demonstration be supported in transition scenarios
• How can we use Web 2.0 and social software to support transition processes
• Where do learners gain support from teachers, trainers or peers in managing their own learning for transition
• What roles could Personal Learning Networks or Personal Learning Environments play in transition processes”

It all sounded very fine when I wrote the proposal last January. But the proposal didn’t require me to say HOW i was going to design and run the workshop. I only had one and a quarter hours and to make it worse the workshop was scheduled for the final confernce session – after lunch on a Friday afternoon. What I wanted to do was to go beyind brainstrorming or group work around teh main ideas of the project and inclove particpants in the ongoing research of the project.

The G8WAY project has been undertaking a series of ‘case studies’ of transitions, based on a  story telling approach. To date we have gathered stories from 60 people, in six different countries. We have published the stories on the G8WAY project web site.  At the present time we have two working groups who are looking at the school to university transition case studies and the university to work case studies with the aim of deriving a limited number of persona. These persona are intended to provide a basis for developing social software to assist young people in educational transitions.

We had about 20 particpants in the workshop. I asked them to work in pairs. each pair was given one of the transition stories and asked to analyse it with respect to:

a) Foregrounded and backgrounding of issues in transition, as told in the case study

b) Possible spaces for intervention to support the transition

And, somewhat to my surprise, everyone not only dived into the work but seemed to enjoy it. Indeed, the only regret was that the time was too short. Backgorund issues and potential rooms for interventionf romt he different case studies included:

• Family pressure – need spaces for empowerment and rethinking of options
• Cultural integration – need for spaces / approaches allowing exploration of intergenerational issues
• Lack of support from colleagues in temporary employment – need for more support in finding appropriate job vacancies
• Instability – need for signposting to professional support
• Unsure of identity = need for peer group contact and communication

Of course, without the original case studies this feedback makes little sense. But there was a genuine enthusiasm and interest form participants both in our work and in the process. This has led me to think if we should not extend the exercise,through our project web site, allowing those who are interested but not a project partner to contribute to the project research. Of course that raises the question of why anyone would want to participate voluntarily in ‘Open Research’? The answer I think lies in the relation between research and learning. Participation in a research project can be a powerful form of learning or professional development.

I am constantly being asked to fill in questionnaires and surveys to support different projects. But seldom does the opportunity for involvement go beyond that. It will require some creativity and imagination, but I see no reason why we shouldn’t start opening up our research to all those interested. And that is not just the obligatory bulletin board for visitors to ask questions or add a comment. It means redesigning the research methodologies and processes to allow others to participate. More to come in a future post….

This has been an amazing week. I don’t even know where to start! On Monday we finally hosted the Translation and Interpreting studies online conference some of our PhD students organised. I full report about it was posted on our RGC blog. Kudos to the OCTIS organising team. It was a brilliant project and I [...]

Congratulations to our good friend and colleague (and Pontydysgu blogger) Cristina Costa on winning the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year award. The judges said: “Cristina has developed a set of resources, activities and events that help staff and students to learn to make effective use of social media. She models in her own activities the behaviours that she wishes to encourage. She combines her own research with her overall role to considerable effect.”

Congratulations also to Dave White and the Technology Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL) team from the Department for Continuing Education at Oxford University who won the team award, presented at the annual dinner at the ALTC conference in Nottingham this week.

The first in a series of posts on the recent Association for Learning Technologies Conference (AltC) in Nottingham.  Besides the social side of meeting up with friends from across the UK, AltC is a good place for picking up on the trends in educational technology and, above all judging the mood of the community.

But first, a little about the formal part of the conference (at least the first day, more to follow on subsequent sessions).

I had some trouble getting to the conference due to strikes in London, and ended up listening to the first morning’s keynote through Elluminate on a G3 connection to my computer on a slow cross country train. That felt a little strange but worked quite well. The presentation by Donald Woods Clark (CEO of Epic Learning) was quite strange. variously described by delegates as a ‘traincrash’ and a ‘Glasgow Kiss’ (non UK readers will have to look that one up on Wikipedia!). Woods generally treated delegates to a didactic rant around his prejudices about education. He had never been to Alt C before, he told delegates, because conferences were a waste of time. He was getting angry, he said on a number of occasions (his swearing attracted some comments on twitter). His presentation was focused on the uselessness of lectures. Yet his preferred learning, apart from blogging, appeared to be watching recordings of lectures on iTunes U! It was overall a curious presentation, which although having the virtue of provoking much discussion over form, had little in content to discuss. A pity because I think he did have a theme which got lost in the invective. His general line, with which I have some sympathy, was that the present model of education is unsustainable and especially at university level cannot be expanded to include all those who wish to pursue a higher education. However, where he totally failed, was in putting forward any coherent vision of what an alternative might be – either at an organisational or pedagogic level. He seemed to dismiss the idea of any social aspect to learning. Instead he saw technology per se as the answer. or at least that is the impression I got from my train seat vantage point.

I was greatly impressed with the Tuesday early afternoon session with Helen Beetham et al on Digital Literacies. The work she and colleagues are carrying out for Jisc seems to me to be providing a richer pedagogic approach to how we can use technology for learning and an integration of technology as a transformative force in tecahing and learning. Haydon Buckley, in stark contrast to the morning keynote, treated us to an excellent example of the power of the spoken word, when, without powerpoints, he told us about experiences at the University of Glamorgan in introducing digital literacy across the curriculum (that was a speech which should have been streamed). The only thing which slightly puzzled me in the otherwise excellent pack of materials the Jisc funded project has produced is the underpinning Digital Literacies Framework model. The materials are available through the project Cloudworks site (however they link to slideshare and downloads from there do not seem to be working properly).  However my problem was that the model preserves the traditional UK distinction of ‘skills’. This tendency to separate skills from competence or from content underpins many problems in developing and implementing new pedagogic approaches to learning.

The third session I attended was a lot of fun.James Clay led a workshop entitled ‘Do you like books or do you like learning’? He demoed a number of different ebook readers and talked about experiences of using these devices at Gloucester College. This sparked considerable debate particularly about the relationships between publishers and the education community. My personal view is that cheap ebook readers may be one of the most significant scene changers in education, particularly as the use of the devices will span home and work, educational use and uses for pleasure.

One of the mots encouraging trends at the conference was the increasing move away from a focus on educational technology towards a focus on learning. Thus many of the research papers were drawing on social science methodologies and approaches. With the increasing integration of technology in teaching and learning, I wonder how much longer we are going to need conferences geared specifically at learning technologies.

However, underpinning the conference was the looming cutbacks in funding. This has already hit the educational technology sector with the forthcoming closure of Becta and the reduction in funding for Jisc.  The UK’s leading role in the use of technology for learning has been driven both by irelatuively generous unfrastructure investment but above all by very substatial project funding. Those days are over and a mood of uncertainty over the future pervaded the conference. Whilst there were attempts to pput a brave face on things through looking at increased pressues for sharing and the potential of bottom up networks, it seems unlikely the rate of innovation can be sustained without funding. Of course it is possible to question how effective that funding has been with may innovations remeianing isloated in islands of practice. Once more the likelhood is a refocusing on education and the role of technology in tecahing and learning, rather than the focus of many projects on innovationsin learning technologies, with pedagogy and teaching and learning playing second fiddle.

Further reports to follow.

Właśnie doszły mnie wieści, że Komisja Europejska rozpoczęła konsultacje publiczne dotyczące wtórnego wykorzystania informacji pochodzących z sektora publicznego. Informacje te obejmują wszelkiego rodzaju dane publiczne, np. mapy, informacje meteorologiczne, prawne, finansowe i ekonomiczne, informacje o ruchu drogowym. A wszystko to w ramach Europejskiej agendy cyfrowej, która ma przyczynić się do zwiększenia konkurencyjności, innowacji i zatrudnienia w UE.

Chodzi o to, aby informacje te można było wykorzystywać dla nowych rozwiązań, takich jak geonawigacja, informacje z różnych krajów w postaci aplikacji przeznaczonych na urządzenia mobilne, np. smartfony. UE argumentuje, że wykorzystanie informacji pochodzących z sektora publicznego może przyczynić się do powstawania nowych przedsiębiorstw i nowych miejsc pracy. Takie wtórne wykorzystanie informacji pochodzących z sektora publicznego, ma jednak moim zdaniem nie tylko potencjał ekonomiczny, ale przede wszystkim społeczny. Czyż nie chodzi nam o to, aby sektor publiczny stał sie bardziej przejrzysty i zrozumiały dla wszystkich? Aby ludzie w Europie byli dobrze poinformowani, świadomi, wyemancypowani, kreatywni i aktywni? Aby takie dane publiczne można było wykorzystywać do nieformalnych procesów uczenia się? Szkoda tylko, że unijne dyrektywy o tych celach nie wspominają…

A druga nowinka, która do mnie dotarła to Civic Commons. Tym razem spoza UE, z USA. W tym projekcie chodzi o to, aby zachęcić sector publiczny do udostępniania własnych oprogramowań, dzielenia się kodami i dobrymi przykładami, taka by przyśpieszyć rozwój innowacji i zredukować koszty tworzenia rozwiązań.  Celem jest stworzenie repozytorium  technologicznych rozwiązań, które byłoby dostępne dla sektora publicznego w innych państwach.

Czyż te dwie inicjatywy to nie zmiana paradygmatu? Czy sieć semantyczna to zwiastun globalnej współpracy?

The annual conference season is in full swing. Tomorrow Graham Attwell from Pontydysgu will be travelling to Nottingham for the Association for Learning Technology annual conference.

And Pontydysgu will also be supporting the F-ALT fringe event. Following on the success of F-ALT 08, and F-ALT 09 we’re looking forward to an even more fabulous series of unconference events. This Year ALT-C is in Nottingham.

F-ALT 10 will consist of a variety of sessions held in public, conference and university spaces. Delegates are encouraged to experiment with format, with slots focusing discussion and allowing participants and bystanders to experiment with an alternative conference format. Participants pick the topics they are most interested in debating and negotiate session delivery.

F-ALT also features the Annual Edubloggers meetup which will take place on the evening of the 7th of September, this year at the Cast Bar (attached to the Playhouse, Nottingham City Centre).

The Tag is falt10 and #falt10 for Twitter

I talked in previous posts about our work with the European Conference on Educational Research to ‘amplify’ the conference, recently held in Vienna. This involved setting up various social media channels including a Twitter stream and a iTunesU page, producing a series of video interviews with conveners of the different networks which organise ECER and b9radcasting three live radio shows from the conference.

We also undertook to stream four keynote speeches, run in two parallel sessions as well as the opening. Easy, I thought. Like many of you I have live streamed from different events, pointing a camera or even a MacBook at the speaker and linking in to  uStream or Justin.tv or one of the other social video platforms. It turned out not to be so simple.

We were working with a community not generally used to social media. And quite simply, the idea of pointing them to a platform advertising poker, acne treatments didn’t seem a good idea. Plus we had an issue with the reliability and quality of the free services. Livestream looked a better idea especially though their premium accounts. This allows you to have your own channel and remove the adverts.but a single channel on Livestream costs 350 dollars a month, with twelve months billing in advance. And we needed two channels. Back to the drawing board. We discovered that Ustream has set up another service called Watershed and indeed for a time were tempted by this. Watershed offers per view payments, but the prices are relatively high. And the terms and conditions of service for the monthly or annual contracts was impenetrable. No problem, we thought, we will ring them and clarify the conditions. Then we discovered there was no telephone number on their site. All you cold do was ask questions on a bulletin board, largely filled with complaints about the service and the total lack of technical support.

OK – so that didn’t seem such a good idea. Last resort – ask a friend. I twittered out for anyone with ideas of a service we could use. And somewhat to my surprise, no-one could come up with a solution, other than the services we had already looked at.

Back to searching on the Internet. Of course there are many companies offering professional streaming services but they all seem geared towards corporate or media organisations, not towards education or for relatively low numbers of live viewers.

I finally stumbled on a web site from a Canadian company called NetroMedia. Their prices were not clear but they said that for one off events you could fill in a query form. So I did, not with any great hope. To my surprise about half an hour later, I had an email reply asking for more details about the event I wished to stream. And to my even greater surprise, some forty minutes after returning this a person rang me. Yes, a real live person!!!

She calculated how much bandwidth we would need and offered us a service for 100 Canadian dollars, plus 20 dollars for unlimited technical support. (Note that if you buy into this or a similar service, it is important to buy sufficient bandwidth in advance, extra bandwidth per view is relatively expensive). Woo, away we go. Even better some twenty minutes after paying them, Darren, the technical support man rung us. This was very helpful, because although the set up is relatively simple, we required two video streams going out simultaneously, and that required a little fiddling.

NetroMedia do not offer a portal for streams. Instead they provide a streaming service and you embed a Flash video player in your own web site. This suited us just fine. The up stream was encoded through the free Adobe Flash Media Encoder, which worked well on both a PC and a Mac. The only thing I would like is to have more direction control over what we were streaming – e.g to be able to switch between a feed from the data projector and the video but I am sure we can work out how to do that. I am very happy with the quality of the streaming (you can view the recordings by clicking on read more on each of the channels on the ECER video streaming web page) although we were helped in this regard by the kind loan from Helsinki University of two very good video cameras.

Of course, if you are working in a University or large organisation, you may be able to run your own streaming server.But such an investment is beyond Pontydysgu, or I guess many small organisations. Yet video streaming is going to be an important part of Amplifying future events. And we need a reliable and reasonable quality of service.  I would certainly go to Netromedia again. But I also wonder if there is some way we could collectively organise resources for streaming in the educational technology community to both share know-how and expertise and infrastructure.