Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

In one of those curious cultural quirks, thousands of Germans will settle down this evening to watch the annual new years eve showing of ‘Dinner for One’, a 1963 comedy starring Freddie Frinton and May Warden. Why, no-one quite seems to know.

But now there is a remake The 90th Euro Rescue Summit – or Euros for No One by satirist Udo Eling who, according to the Daily Telegraph, “teamed up with state broadcaster ARD to rework the original, putting the French president’s head on butler James’ body, and the German Chancellor’s head onto the body of Miss Sophie.”

Unlike the original which is broadcast in English, the new version is in German. And for those of you whose German is not quite up to scratch the Daily Teegrapgh provides a helpful summary.

“Mrs Merkel follows the original Miss Sophie in assuming that her long-dead friends are there – whose drinks are all supped by the butler – and talks of former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

She also reprimands an absent British Prime Minister David Cameron that “German will be spoken at the dinner.”

True to the original, Mr Sarkozy, the butler, drinks for all his mistress’ guests and gets increasingly inebriated, prompting Mrs Merkel to say: “Nicolas, think of your credit rating!” – a reference to the downgrades looming over France from international ratings agencies.

At the end he helps her upstairs for what in the original is referred to as “the same procedure as every year” and in the satirical version would be conducted without Eurobonds. The butler says to Miss Sophie he will do his best as ever, promising to give Merkel his “Triple A”.”

Very happy to see the paper on Building Personal Learning Environments by using and mixing ICT tools in a professional way, by Linda Castañeda and Javier Soto and presented at PLE2010, win the The Downes Prize 2011. Especially so as it was published in the Digital Education Review, an open access online journal.

And it coincides with the call for papers for PLE2012, being held in Aveiro in Portugal and Melbourne, Australia. Here is a copy of the blog I wrote to launch the call.

“When we first launched the PLE conference we wanted to do something different. “Why is it that the best part of conferences is the time you spend with colleagues outside the conference?”, we asked. “How can we make the conference sessions as entertaining as the social?” “How can we encourage people to learn from each other, rather than sitting passively watching powerpoint slides?”

And we wanted the conference to be open and accessible to as many interested people as possible including young researchers.

At the same time we realised that formal paper submissions were important in gaining support from universities for travel and attendance at the conference. We also acknowledged that journal publications remain important for career development for many researchers.

So we tried to balance all these things. We issued a call for formal paper proposals but at the same time encouraged submissions in other formats – workshops, bring-a laptop demos, and pecha keucha sessions. And when we were designing the programme we tried to build in unconferencing sessions as well as more traditional formats. We also said that even if you submit a formal paper, you can still use less traditional ways of delivering that paper. We tried to support people in working together in collaborative sessions. We also invented the unkeynotes where keynote speakers were challenged themselves to find new and collaborative ways of engaging with the audience.

Even small things can make a difference. Rather than provide the usual uniform conference badges we asked participants to make their own, to reflect their PLEs.

It seems to have worked. The PLE conference is not the biggest educational technology event, neither would we want it to be. But feedback constantly refers to the warmth of the atmosphere, the mutual support and the intensity of the learning experience.

2012 sees the third PLE conference, building on the previous events in Barcelona and Southampton. And yet again this year we want to push out the boundaries – to do something new. So this year conference takes place not in one venue but in two. And although the venues are interlinked by people and personal networks they are geographically a long distance apart. The conference will take place in Aveiro in Portugal and in Melbourne in Australia on 11 – 13 July 2012. Both events share a common organising committee and call for proposals. Both events will share common electronic spaces and spaces for networking. And we are hoping that despite the time differences we will be able to share some of the sessions through the use of technology.

One conference – two venues – PLE2012 is going to be a lot of fun.

This time of the year things are supposed to be quiet. Christmas parties and that kind of stuff. However at Pontydysgu its not like that this year – though a dare say we may stop for the odd mince pie and glass of mulled wine in the next few days.

We have been completing project reports and writing new proposals. And I have been traveling for the last five weeks. So there is plenty to update on this blog.

The week before last I was in Bucharest for the final conference of the PREZENT! project – aiming to increase participation in continuing training for those at risk in the labour market. The project has taken a series of actions over providing access information, and awareness about opportunities for continuing and lifelong learning in Romania.

And it turned out to be a very inter sting event. The conference organisers had produced a draft strategy on training in Romania and used the event for consultation prior to submitting the strategy to the education ministry. Although I was struggling to follow the debate (my Romanian being non existent) the strategy certainly seemed to have sparked off a considerable discussion.

Yet many of the issues were hardly new, or indeed unique to Romania. Delegates were concerned about business models and how training should be financed. Indeed, there seemed to be much support for the idea of a training levy on enterprises. Delegates were concerned about the quality and regulation of training. And delegates were concerned about professional development for training and particularly over the use of technology for training.

Personally I felt they were over optimistic about the potential impact of legislative change or even at getting legislation right. However this might reflect different cultures and certainly in the past there has been some evidence that Romanian governments have taken more interest in training than the UK (although that is not difficult!).

My contribution to the conference was mostly based on the use of technology to support informal learning. And although everyone was very polite and said how much they had enjoyed the presentation I am not sure they got it. Learning remains inextricably bound to formal training programmes usually linked to classroom or workshop delivery. Whilst there might be acknowledgement of the importance of informal learning it goes no further than that.

Possibly it is because trainers see no role for themselves in informal learning. however I have long held that informal learning does not happen by accident. Informal learning depends on rich learning environments be they in school or in the workplace. And informal learning depends on the ability to use that learning in work or in everyday life. For many their job does not provide either that richness in activities or in learning environment. For many the workplace is just a source of drudgery. And this could be the vital role trainers could take – in designing and developing rich learning environments. But I think for that we would require new ways of recognising learning based on learning processes rather than merely accrediting outcomes. And whilst education and training remains dominated by a discourse around competences that doesn’t seem likely to happen.

No real surprises in this report from the UK schools inspectorate, OFSTED, as reported by the Guardian newspaper.

The Guardian says: “Schools are jeopardising the career prospects of thousands of teenagers by failing to offer compulsory classes in computing, a damning report by inspectors shows.

A three-year study by Ofsted found that in almost a fifth of secondary schools, up to half of 14- to 16-year-olds are not taught computing – known as Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

The subject is compulsory for children aged five to 16 and is seen as crucial to rebuilding of the economy.

Inspectors denounced the quality of teaching in the subject as inadequate in more than a quarter of secondary schools.

Too many ICT teachers have limited knowledge of key skills, such as computer programming, they said.

High-flying students are often not stretched and their interests in the subject are ignored, while many pupils spend computing lessons repeating tasks asked of them a year ago.”

I think the problem goes back years to the days of the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL). The ECDL focused on the ability to use a standard PC, and despite valiant attemts to produce an open source version, the ability to use standard Microsoft applications. This has little to do with ICT or technology and nothing to do with programming. The ECDL was highly sucessful and permeated school practice, where students were taught how to make powerpoint presentations, use a spreadsheet etc.

However the criticisms of this approach and the weaknesses of teaching ICT are not new. What is interesting is that the issue has now come to the fore. I am not quite sure why, but it is very encouraging to see such a debate.

David White (University of Oxford) and Dr. Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC) have been attracting quite a stir with their JISC-funded work on Visitors and Residents: What Motivates Engagement with the Digital Information Environment?, being undertaken as part of the Developing Digital Literacies programme webinar series.

Slides, audio and a recording of the Blackboard Collaborate session where they presented some of the findings of their work can be found at http://bit.ly/jiscdiglitvr.

Amy Gahran has written an interesting article on the slow take off of QR codes. She quotes research by Archrival, a research group that focuses on youth marketing, which surveyed 500 students at 24 colleges and universities across the United States who “found that although about 80% of students owned a smartphone and had previously seen a QR code, only about 20% were able to successfully scan the example QR code they were shown.

Furthermore, about 75% said they were unlikely to scan a QR code in the future.”

One of the reasons advanced for the findings was that the process of accessing QR codes is too clunky and time consuming. So far I agree. Firing up the app and getting it to scan can be a pain.

But I would disagree with another of their conclusions. Archival suggest that QR codes need to provide “content that engenders a more meaningful connection to the brand or product.”

On the contrary I suspect it is just because QR codes are becoming associated with brands and products that we are reluctant to use them. In this respect context is critical. I will not use a QR code just to access some random brand or product web site. On the other hand if the code does something useful (and I know it is going to do something useful) like tell me the time of the next rain or bus or allow me to check in for my flight then I will and do use QR codes. And even if QR codes are thought to be an interim technology towards augmented reality and near field communication the same issues arise.

These findings reflect a growing tension between the development of social networks and services designed for us (the 99 per cent) and those for the one per cent or less of companies wanting to use social networks and advanced technologies for selling brands and products. The problem is that social network and service providers are more concerned with the one per cent than the 99. This has led to Facebook’s constant attempts to erode privacy in order to provide more data for advertisers. Even Twitter, which has perhaps been the most brand free of the networks has launched a re-design which seems primarily intended to facilitate brand advertising.

Such tensions will not go away. Web 2.0 was launched on the back of free service paid for by real (or hoped for) advertising revenue. Yet such revenues are finite. Ultimately we need to develop new and more robust business models which better reflect the nature and purpose of the services provided.

This does not mean there is no future for QR codes and other augmented mobile applications. There are a number of very convincing experiments of their use in education. But where they do work, in a social sense, the context and purpose is clear. And that is for learning, for interaction for creativity, not for pushing brands and products we do not want.

FSCONS: YaCy Demo from Michael Christen on Vimeo.

OK….this is a techy video. But it is important. In an age when large software companies are increasingly controlling the internet, YaCy has been developed as a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. YaCy developers say:  “When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world’s users.”

Here is a fun article from the WalesOnline, reporting on the publication of a new book looking at mistranslations between English and Welsh.

Examples include "the badly translated shop sign which reads “wines and ghosts” in Welsh and "the baffling bilingual road sign that warns Welsh- speaking motorists to beware of “exploding workers”.

But there is a serious side to this. Firstly, despite recent advances in machine translation there is still a considerable way to go. And even when machines can translate language literally, it is much more difficult to translate meanings. We are confronted with this constantly in international projects where whilst the lingua franca might be English and we all think we know what we are talking about, the meanings we make of different ideas and concepts may be very different. In most European languages there is a word sounding something like competence. But our understandings of the meanings of that word vary greatly depending on culture. Secondly, in developing Technology Enhanced Learning we continue to struggle to develop common understandings between different disciplines, with educationalist and developers often seemingly talking completely different languages.

Maybe we need bi-lingual roadmaps!

Graham Attwell is delivering a keynote presentation on Learning and New Technologies to the ‘Encouraging participation in continuing training in Romania, with focus on disadvantaged employees’ project in Bucharest on Wednesday 7 December.

I stumbled on thie excellent Art Threat web site featuring 10 documentary films on capitalism and economics. Art Threat says “With the Occupy Wall Street manifestations taking up much of our social and political imaginations these days, we thought we’d highlight a few great films that bring context to the current uprising and related issues.”

The first to be featured is The American Ruling Class, described as “An imaginative hybrid film (a dramatic documentary musical no less!) that follows the former editor of Harper’s magazine, Louis Lapham, as he encounters and provokes the haves of American society while giving due time to the have-nots and their rascally resistance tactics.”