Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

This story is all over the net and I can’t resist wading in.

From Wikinews: “South Australian primary school teacher Al Upton was ordered to shut down an educational blogging initiative last week following a directive from the South Australian Department of Education. Al Upton is internationally recognised for his educational blogging efforts over the past 5 years, but his recent project known as The Minilegends has attracted concerns from parents generally relating to interactions between children and adults online..”

This case raises big issues and it is good that the educational technology community has reacted so strongly.

What is notable about the Minilegends project was the care Al had gone to in tecahing students about not only internet safety but how to develop their own digital identity and presence and the issues around that. He had also informed parents in advance about the aims of the project and had obtained parental permission for the children to take part.

The reasons for the close down notice appear to revolve around two issues and both warrant further discussion. The first is that the children used real photos of themselves rather than avatars. Al’s view is that students benefit from seeing their own images. If students – of whatever age – are going to develop an authentic on-line presence then pictures play a big part in this. And pictures are a representation of ourselves. Witness the many ridiculous photographs people use on Facebook or the student prank videos on YouTube. Are these a real image of who they are? What pictures we choose to use is a message we are saying about ourselves. Is it possible to set an age when it is safe ot use a real photograph to represent ourselves? Clearly not. The key issue is that developing and managing our digital identity is seen as pat of learning in just the same way as developing other social skills. Of course this raises issues about safety. But so does just about any other learning activity. Sue Waters links to a Review of the February/March issue of the journal American Psychologist and titled, “Online ‘Predators’ and Their Victims: Myths, Realities and Implications for Prevention. Definitely worth a read, she says, because it highlights many of the concerns are myths and that “there is no doubt that Internet predators are real, and do pose a threat. But the real danger is the public’s deeply flawed understanding of the problem.”
The second issue is the use of adult mentors to support students. I really don’t know what to say. We have daily interactions between adults and children. What seems to be sparking the panic here is because the interaction is on-line. There is a real danger to saying that whilst children can talk with adults face to face they cannot do so digitally.

If one good thing comes out of this it may be that we will get an open debate about the use of the internet for communication and learning. How have we got to the absurd situation that Bebo, Facebook and the burgeoning Disney sites are seen as OK for kids, whilst a well thought through educational project is closed down?

I am delighted to post the latest in our occasional series of guest blogs. Jenny Hughes is a great friend of mine and works for Pontydysgu. She is not a regular blogger but that has not stopped us having many discussions about blogging.

“I’ve been staying with Graham in Bremen for the last 10 days. We’ve drunk too much, smoked too much, spent every evening in the pub making copious notes on beer mats and then stayed up every night discussing ideas that are going to change the world. OK when you are a student but the wisdom of doing this when you are approaching 60 is doubtful. The outcome of it all is that we did prodigious amounts of work but Graham, being the more geriatric of the two of us, is still in his bed, exhausted, at 11 am on Wednesday.

We also made lists. Every night in the bar, we made a list of work we simply had to do the next day – which we then lost and the following evening we made a new list. Last night’s list said “must do my blog – Gra” but as we crawled out of the Viva (one of the best bars in Bremen) on the wrong side of midnight, Graham’s last slurred whimper was  “You’ll hash to do m’blog f’me.”

So here goes…..

As I said, this week has been a strange mix of ‘doing’ (uninterrupted hours of banging away at a keyboard) ‘talking’ (shared coffee and fag breaks) and ‘thinking’ (invariably between 10 pm and 3 or 4 am in the Viva). Nothing particularly unusual about this except that I was fascinated how the agenda became so explicit and the fact that were planning-in thinking time (which was, in fact, intensive talk time) as opposed to ‘talking time’ when we tended to discuss what we were going to think about. (Keeping up?)  It made me wonder how many people actually have this luxury – a job where you can sit in the pub and get paid for ‘doing thinking’.

One of the first things Gra told me to ‘do thinking about…’ was the  idea of ‘bricolage’, as used by John Steely Brown to describe the different way that kids are learning in the digital age.  What JSB said was

“Classically reasoning has been concerned with the deductive and the abstract. But our observation of kids working with digital media suggests bricolage to us more than abstract logic. Bricolage…..relates to the concrete. It has to do with abilities to find something – an object, tool document, a piece of code – and to use it to build something you deem important. Judgment is inherently critical to becoming an effective bricoleur.”

Other than a month in France last summer renovating a house – which meant a daily trip to the bricollage (DIY) shop, I had largely forgotten the concept. In fact, ‘Bricolage’ was a word which I had always felt was becoming ‘devalued’ used as it now is for naming coffee bars, nightcubs, content mangagement software, record labels and the like.

However, I think JSB use of the term is interesting and helpful. This was a concept which had fascinated me as a student back in the 60’s and 70’s, when Claude Levi-Strauss was one of my guru,s but which I had not thought to apply in this context. JSB had tripped some useful switches for me.

In fact I thought it might be interesting for me to go back to the source of these ideas to see whether I could make anymore connections so I revisited “The Savage Mind” (1966) and came up with some (personally) useful ‘treasures’ (treasures = the word Levi Strauss used to describe the ‘bits and pieces’ of  knowledge a bricoleur has in his chest).

One of his (L-S)  key ideas is that the concept of bricolage refers to the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signifying objects to produce new meanings in fresh contexts. Bricolage involves a process of resignification by which cultural signs with established meanings are re-organised into new codes of meaning.

Meaning what exactly….well, the examples most often used examples are drawn from popular culture. For example the  construction of the Teddy Boy style of the 50’s combined an otherwise unrelated Edwardian upper-class look, a Mid West American cowboy bootlace tie and brothel creepers in the context of a youth culture. Likewise the boots, braces, shaved hair, Stayprest shirts and Ska music of the Skinheads of the 70s was a symbolic bricolage that signifies the hardness of working class masculinity.

That is not an un-useful idea for me.  There was a time when use of computers, electronic communication technology, instruments, an impenetrable technical language and the like were all part of the cultural ‘myth’ of the scientist, the academic boffin in his laboratory surrounded by wires and huge machines that in someway symbolized the idea of personal discovery and making the break through that would re-shape the world…..Conversely, ‘tools’ were symbols of craftsmen, the myth of the ‘honest artisan’.

Now I am the parent of 5 children, computers, electronic communication thingummies, gadgets, widgets, technobabble and a house full of grunting teenagers with surgically attached headphones, mobile phones Velcro-ed to their ears and  I-pods at breakfast are all part of the cultural myth of “Yoof”.

Which, of course is in total opposition to the cultural myth called ‘education and learning’.  How many parents (and the Daily Telegraph and Chris Woodward)  be-moan the fact that ‘can’t get their children to pick up a book’ or ‘they never read nowdays’ or restrict access times to computers ‘because it’s bad for them’ and they ‘should be doing their homework’ and ‘you can’t tear them away from their screens’? Hmmm! When I was a kid it was ‘ Could you get out head out of that book and do something useful.’

The other main use of the term Bricolage, is ‘the juxtaposition of signs in the visual media to form a collage of images from different times and places. This kind of bricolage as a cultural style is a core element of post-modern culture. (Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies)

So we have concrete shopping centres with ‘modern’ architecture incorporating cafes with stripped pine furniture and red-checked Mid West ranch house table cloths juxtaposed with jungle areas of exotic plants and Victoriana pubs.

[Some people would call it kitsch (if done with irony), for others it is post modernism!]

In the same way the global multiplication of communication technologies has created an increasingly complex semiotic environment of competing signs and meanings. This creates a flow of images and juxtapositions that fuses news, drama, reportage, advertising etc into an electronic bricolage. Some people have started to use that horrible word ‘edutainment’ to try and capture this but communication bricolage works better for me.

My ramblings are about to end rather abruptly because Graham has just got up and I can hear the sweet noise of the coffee grinder …

“Graham – is blogging a post modern version of a diary or is it just kitsch…?”

(answer not printable).”

It is very sad to see Eduspaces is shutting down from the 10th January. It is not a big surprise. It has been fairly openly known that Dave and Ben from Curverider wanted out. What is very disappointing that no-one stepped in to take the service over.

As Josie Fraser says “Eduspaces and the Curverider team have provided a really important service, and an even more important model for the international education sector – demonstrating how web 2.0 and social technologies can be used to support learning and teaching, and showing the world what a learner-centric system might look like.”

What I liked about Eduspaces was the mixture of different cultures and languages. Projects, conferences, communities are predominantly mono-lingual.  Eduspaces was an experiment in letting everybody speak their own language and then make sense of what they could. We need more of this. And we need more communal places for sharing ideas.

Anyway, the good news is that ELGG remains open source and Curverider remain committed to supporting ELGG. Thanks to Dave and Ben for all their work in the last and good luck in the future.

I got offered a job blogging a few weeks ago.

It was a good offer – to contribute some 10-15 items a week to a blog about Open Educational resources. The items did not have to be long. And the pat was quite reasonable.

I thought long and hard – and finally rather reluctantly turned it down. Reluctant – because it seems a bit of a dream to be paid for doing something I enjoy writing about something which interests me.

But there seem two drawbacks. The first is that I find blogging on the road to be difficult. When I am involved in a run of intensive meetings and workshops I don’t always have the headspace for blogging. And the second is that I am afraid it would destroy the fun of blogging. Along with others, I have always wondered how Stephen Downes keeps writing OL Daily, day in, day out. Sometimes I just don’t want to blog – I don’t feel I have anything to say. And at other times I have a lot to say. For me my blog is part of my everyday work and everyday life – and the blog has to fit in – not the other way round of me having to write the blog.

I am interested in these issues because of an emerging discourse in the Emerge community about the possibility of a project on using Web 2.0 and social software for supporting academic writing.

It is an interesting idea and an important one. Often, if I am working on an academic paper or a contribution to a book, I do not blog. The style of expression is just too different to quickly switch formats.

So, I suspect we may have to reconsider just what is academic writing. I have been involved in a number of projects trying to use Wikis for co-development and collective writing of research papers and training materials. It is not easy and requires a great deal of planning. I suspect this will be the way we work in the future – especially in the context of European projects involving collaboration between researchers in different countries. But we have a lot to learn about how to do it.

I’d be interested in anyone else’s thoughts (and experiences) on this subject.

Not so many posts on this blog lately.

Well – for one thing I have been traveling a lot and I find it difficult to blog whilst on the road.

For another thing the API for my ecto client is broken which means I have to use a web interface – this always takes longer.

But more significant is that I am doing quite a lot of things to support blogging. We have set up a MOSEP blog site using elgg spaces so that project participants can develop their own e-Portfolios. I am trying to support that process. Supporting and facilitating others in blogging is hugely rewarding. But it is difficult to be providing regular feedback and thinking up new tasks whilst keeping up the blogging on the main site at the same time. I guess its just another skill to learn.