Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

Its Glastonbury festival this week in the UK – guaranteed to bring cold weather and rain. Sorry not to be there but happy to feature this great performance by Jimmy Cliff.

This morning I delivered a keynote speech (or more like a keynote storytelling session) at the European Distance Education Network (EDEN) conference in Dublin. And a lot of fun it was too (particularly chair Sally Reynolds desperate attempts to turn off her mobile phone which went off half way through my talk). The keynote was followed by a panel session with fellow speakers Paul Kim from Stanford University and Clare Dillon from Microsoft, along with Jim device and Alfredo Soeiro and chaired by Gilly Salmon.

Gilly ran the panel session as an unconferencing session with ample opportunities for participation by conference delegates.

The emergent themes shaping the discussion (and indeed the overall conference) were interesting. Also what was not discussed if of some interest. VLEs seem not longer an issue, with an acceptance that learners will appropriate all kinds of technologies for learning. And indeed there was little discussion about technologies themselves. However, emergent themes focused on the soci0-technical uses of technology for learning, its impact on education systems and institutions and indeed the future of education, particularly universities. There were a number of sessions looking at Open education and Open Education Resources, but with a lack of clarity of what these terms mean. Quality is seen as a major issue, especially in terms of the perceived variable quality of online programmes. However approaches to this issue vary. Most delegates seemed to favour some kind of quality benchmarking or approval, although there seemed little idea of how this might work. Equally the issue of accreditation of learning was a major issue but with little consensus on how this should be organised, particularly with relation to ‘open education’.

And whilst there seemed general agreement of the need to extend learning, particularly to those presently without access to formal education or training, there were considerable differences on how this might be achieved and the role of the private sector in such provision.

In some ways the discussions may be seen as a response to the present economic crisis. But in another wayit may refelct the mainstreaming of technology enhanced learning. Maybe we will soon be able to get rid of the e from e-learning.

This toolkit from Jisc has been released for measuring the impact of resources. However it could also be very useful for those seeking to measure project impact, an increasing demand from funding bodies.

The Jisc press release says “Measuring the impact of a resource you’ve put online can be difficult – but a newly updated JISC toolkit will help content creators, publishers and other information professionals understand the reach of their digital assets.

They can use the kit to help guide them through different aspects of measuring impact, both qualitative, such as focus groups, and quantitative, such as web metrics.”

The toolkit can be accessed here.

I am intrigued by this abstract is for a Symposium that will be presented at ALT-C 2011 by Frances Bell, Cristina da Costa, Josie Fraser, Richard Hall and Helen Keegan and is published on Frances Bell’s blog. I am reproducing it in full below.

This symposium will examine the paradoxes of giving and receiving online in education in a changing economic climate.  Each of the panelists will briefly address topic areas within the symposium theme, followed by an opportunity for present and at distance audiences to contribute, concluding with a 25 minute plenary discussion.

Symposium delegates will be provoked to reconsider the costs of participation online by paid and unpaid participants in ‘open’ discussion and sharing of resources.

Open Educational Resources exist within communities that create, use and sustain them (Downes 2007). When ‘communities’ in Higher Education break down due to redundancy and casualisation of labour what happens to OERs? Are they sustained? Can they reach out to other contexts?

All areas of education, including the school sector, currently face significant financial challenges and uncertainties. Institutions are increasingly reviewing the provision of devices and services, and looking at learner owned devices and commercially owned ‘free’ cloud-based services. What is the real price of an education system supported and transformed by embedded learning technologies?

Ownership in the age of openness calls for clarity about mutual expectations between learners, communities and ourselves. Ideas and content are shared easily through open platforms, and yet attributions can be masked in the flow of dissemination: does credit always go where it is due?

Openness in the production, sharing and reuse of education/resources is meaningless in the face of neoliberalism. Where coercive competition forms a treadmill for the production of value, openness/OERs are commodified. Control of the educational means of production determines power to frame how open are the relations for the production or consumption of educational goods or services, in order to realise value. The totality of this need, elicited by the state for capital, rather than the rights of feepayers, parents, communities or academics, shapes how human values like openness are revealed and enabled within HE.

Scarce research monies focus attention on impact factors, arguably stagnating practice. For publications, Open Access can increase wider societal impact but at the expense of career progression.We explore the tensions, paradoxes and professional costs on societal benefits, individual agency and academic progression.

Obviously this is a bit of a mash up proposal but it does raise a lot of questions. I think there is a tension between the idea of communities and institutions. Communities of practice, and for that matter the communities in which Open education Resources are being produced and shared, cross institutional boundaries. Furthermore the use of OERs may be within an institutional setting but may also be outside.

This again is reflected in recognition and reward structures. Whilst reward structures within institutions are based on either monetary compensation or in terms of progression, rewards within the community may reflect a wider understanding of recognition, especially respect or standing within that community. Does credit always go to who it should? Probably not, but this is taking a very individualistic view of research. Surely credit should be shared in the community rather than in the closed door offices of academic researchers.

Are OERs being commodified? Presumably the term “coercive competition” refers to the growing practice to require academics and researchers to publish their work as OERs. I don’t really understand what the authors mean in saying “The totality of this need, elicited by the state for capital, rather than the rights of feepayers, parents, communities or academics, shapes how human values like openness are revealed and enabled within HE.” Of course the idea of openness is being hijacked by institutions. But at the same time the movement towards openness is contradictory and I am not sure this is reflected in the abstract. Especially missing is a discussion of the nature of OERs in allowing reuse and modification and the impact this has on (commodified) relations of production and intellectual property. And at the same time, the spread of OERs is allowing new open forms of learning and knowledge production outside the confines of the institution. thus whilst the movement towards OERs may be becoming commodified the use of OERs is challenging traditional understandings of those very commodities.

I don’t think this reveals a paradox but a dialectical contradiction. Present schooling models of education are being found to be wanting. The discussion about open education is important in that it could provide an alternative to privatisation. The discussion over OERs forms an important part of this debate and to this extent the debate over this symposium is extremely interesting.

Earlier this week I was at an international project meeting in Pontypridd in Wales. As is common with such meetings, and indeed many training events, it was held in a hotel. The hotel meeting room was perfectly adequate with plenty of space and natural light. Indeed I would not have given it two minutes thought normally. I have been in many much worse venues.

However only three days earlier I had been lucky to visit a Welsh medium primary school in Pontypridd. And the contrast was stunning. The school is housed in an old building and perhaps lacks many of the design features we would wish for in a school today (it is notable that windows were positioned high up in the room to stop children looking out during lessons!). Yet as an environment for learning the classroom I went into wads stunning. Every wall was covered in different themed displays with much of the work being by the children themselves. The tables were covered, seemingly at random – although I am sure it was not, with different tactile learning materials. There were different spaces and corners for different activities. Games littered the floor.

I couldn’t help comparing this primary school with the learning environment we had developed for our meeting. And for that matter, with the sterility of many online learning environments. Why if primary school teachers (and teaching assistants) are able to produce such rich learning environments, do we have such learning-poor environments for grown ups? Why can’t we develop such creative spaces for learning in universities, in workplaces and in public spaces? Is it a question of teacher training? Is it a question of curriculum? Or is it a societal attitude towards learning?

I’d be interested in your comments

I have been watching quite a few of the TED talks lately, having participated in the TEDxKids event ten days ago in Brussels as a guest reporter on Twitter. And I am struck by the vast and seemingly goring gulf in the discourse between those advocating the imaginative use of computers and mobile devices for learning and the official discourses of education administrations. Whilst TED speakers promote creativity, the need to make mistakes, active making and learning, the use of games and collaborative approaches to learning, official discourses, at least in England and it seems in many other countries too, talk of outcomes and testing, curriculum, of behaviour and discipline and so on.

It is hard to see how these different discourses can be resolved.It is also sometimes hard to see the spaces in the official education systems for the creative spaces for experimenting that are needed if we are to introduce new pedagogic approaches to teaching and learning.

I spent an evening this week diiscussing semantic and computational search engines with my friend Jenny Hughes. Jenny is convinced of the potential of computational search engines and was showing me the outcomes of searches using the Wolfram Alpha search engine.

Conrad Wolfram has recently did a TED talk where he suggests that we consider changing the math teaching model, to teach kids to conceptualize problems and use computerized tools to apply solutions, as opposed to the present model of spending inordinate amounts of time teaching how to perform calculations “by hand”. He methodically addresses many misperceived ideas behind today’s approach to math education.