Pontydysgu - Bridge to Learning Pontydysgu.org

A brilliant guest post from my esteemed friend John Pallister.

“I dropped into a bar last night, well actually I listened in to some folks talking about where they were going to go and I decide to have a look there. I lurked around in a corner for a while, then sat down at the bar and watched. It was a bit strange, the bar did not have a barman, it looked to be a help-yourself establishment. People, who I have to admit did look a bit strange, were helping themselves to some strange things and seemed to enjoy jumping around a lot. They all appeared to know each other and were chatting about some music that was playing in the background. I attempted a bit of chit chat, although my natural reserved stopped me from dancing on the bar. As usual, I very quickly cleared the bar with everyone whizzing off with some feeble excuse about having to build a tower! I wandered a bit and got lost. I ended up in an adult area with a scantily clad Avatar jumping around in front of me and singing. Now that does not often happen to me often, was I dreaming? How could a grown man, who has a thousand and one real interests, find himself wandering around in a virtual world?

During the past two years I have been on quite a steep learning curve. The need, as a partner in the MOSEP project, to collaborate with colleagues from across Europe forced me to master Skype; Net-meeting; Eluminate Live; Media Wiki; blogging; social bookmarking and collaborative writing etc. I became engaged in a number of social networks and got into the habit of following people who had similar interests. I soon realised that it did not really matter if, having contributed something to a discussion, forum or a Blog, you did not receive a response. I realised that the vast majority of people were lurkers and that people were in fact reading what I was writing and occasionally, were using it to help them with their thinking. So there was a reason for me to participate and contribute. I also found that writing things down did in fact help to move my own thinking forward. I began to follow and contribute to communities, setting up a group and most recently experimenting with micro-blogging.

In the process of following the Jisc Emerge http://elgg.jiscemerge.org.uk/ community I ended up in Second Life last night. I teleported to a Bar on the Emerge Island. I had to apply all of my Functional ICT skills to master the Second Life interface, I did not really practice my Functional English skills but I did listen to others demonstrating their skills, with one person showing that she recognised her responsibility to move a discussion forward, attempting to engage me in the discussion by employing a range of techniques. The exploding Harveywallbanger was a new one to me! I listened to people agreeing how they would work as a team; reflecting on their own strengths; developing a shared understanding of what it was that they were going to work together to achieve; reflecting on their personal strengths and weaknesses and how they might contribute to the work of the team; etc. I was watching people, in a virtual world practising and developing their Functional and Personal Learning and Thinking skills. Had I managed to keep up with them, I am sure that I would have witnessed more as they built the Tower, although I suspect that they went on to a disco – ‘magic dance ball’?

I am beginning to see more and more potential in these environments for learning – but a bit like Twitter I am overcapacity!

I greatly enjoyed the Edumedia conference in Salzburg. Regardless of the formal sessions, what makes the conference is the people and the settings.
ON tuesday we organised an unconference session on the terrace of the conference centre. Or rather we did not organise it. In the best tradition of unconferencing it emerged or just happened. Anyway, the outcome was that Steve ‘Wiki’ wheeler, mobile Mark Kramer. Andreas the podcast Auswarter and a bunch of friends spent two and a half hours discussing the future of technology enhanced learning. The discussion embraced the meaning of mobility and mobile learning, motivation, informal learning, the future of education institutions, deschooling society, web 3.0, MUVEs, emotional learning and more. And thanks to a veritable plethora of recording devices edited highlights of our conversations will be released soon, I am sure.
Much of the discussion centred on mobile learning and, in particular, mico blogging. We were all intrigued by the success of our tweme at the Edumedia conference. The tweme (the word tweme is a mashup of twitter meme) was not an official conference initiative and all that had been done to publicise or explain it was a quick announcement prior to my keynote presentation on the first afternoon of the conference. Yet, despite the very limited bandwidth, a lively community and discourse emerged – see www.twemes.com/edublog08
I am increasingly intrigued by microblogging formats as a way of capturing the incidental learning which happens all the time. Incidental learning is heavily context specific and os based on social interactions.
Incidental learning is episodic but rapid and frequent. Our learning and knowledge base is constantly redrawn, challenged ro adjusted to take account of an on-going stream of incidental learning episodes. This might best be called Lifestream Learning. And twitter and other such microblogging formats offer a compelling way of both capturing and representing such a learning Lifestream. Even more, twitter allows us to express the emotions which as so intrinsically involved in incidental learning in social contexts.
Of course there is a danger of being overwhelmed by a river of data. We need further tools and approaches to filter, search and aggregate our learning life streams. Still more we need tools to assist us in representing such learning, of visualising our knowledge and of combining our own knowledge representations with those of others.
We do not have such tools at the moment (I sort of feel it should be something like the matrix). But being able to capture and represent a community shared lifestream such as Edumedia – even if it was just for two days and we will never experience the precise context again.

I am blogging ‘live’ from the Scil conference at St Gallen. Quite interesting in that the conference is very much geared at the HRD and business world - ‘communities’ I do not venture too far into often. The conference is entitled “The Changing Face of Learning - getting the right balance.” So is learning changing in the business world?

The first speaker up is Erlan Joergensen from Shell. I can’t say much sounds new. His slogan is Ask-Learn-Share. He is very much at pains to say that all learning has to be related to the needs of the business. This seems a step back to me. What he is saying that is new is to integrate - on a business basis - the informal and workplace learning together with formal learning within “global networks”. All courses will have a workplace component.

Certainly Shell do seem to using networking tools - wikis and bookmarks - and have embraced the idea that global networks can link tacit and explicit knowledge through peer assisted problem solving. The wiki, he says, provides the ‘business operational knowledge’ for the whole company. Interesting too, that he calls it “a wikipedia”! Shell are also looking at the use of Second Life.

The wikis are being used to develop communities on different topics with 27000 active users and 2500 new entries in the last month.

OK - time to make my mind up - what do I think? Certainly bringing access to knowledge sharing tools looks impressive. It is not quite clear how such tools and activities are being integrated into the blended courses. That there is a new focus on work based learning - and that supervisors are seen as important in this is not new but does represent a shift of emphasis. However, the relation between individual learning and organisational learning seems unclear. And there are still too many business buzz words for my liking.

Pekka Kamarainen has written an interesting series of blog posts looking at European research in Vocational Education and Training and focusing the ‘European dimension’, ‘interdisciplinarity’ and ‘innovation.’

In his post on innovation ne draws attention to the limited  development in the use of technology for vocational education and training. I think he is right in saying one of the problems is the European Commission obsession with big pictures. It seems to me there is little focus on what is actually happening about teaching and learning - and especially on how learners are using technology and how we might help them. Projects funded by the EU tend to focus on yet more digitalisation of learning materials, yet more on-line handbooks and endless projects on introducing VLEs.

Truly innovative projects tend to be lost in the dross. And the European Commission’s obsession with administration has blinded them to the need to create communities to share innovation.

Furthermore the structures of the programmes have effectively excluded enterprise participation. Whilst VET research is important, so too is the involvement of teachers and trainers - practitioners - in the processes of development. All too often European projects are comprised of reseachers talking about teaching and training but with little or no experience of practice.

I do not  know how we can overcome these problems. I have little faith in the European Commission. The best practices seem to have come from bottom up networks - for instance by language teachers - which can survive the episodic nature of funding support and who share a passion for what they are doing.

I like this from Cristina Costa who uses Skype in much the same way as I do: “We could create a skype chat log ( this is a feature quite unknown by skype users, but this has become the main communication channel of a  group of webcasters I belong to, and it is incredible how the chat has grown and how we have bonded together. Apart from our blogs we keep this skype written chat open and include new people every time someone asks to join us. It is basically an ongoing IM conversation – every time someone has a question, an idea, etc they just type something in that chat log and the others will automatically receive it when they come online. In other words, what it allows us is to engage in a mix of real time and asynchronous communication).”

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Terry Friedman is planning to publish a new version of the popular Coming of Age book.

And along with Leon Cych, he is planning a 24 hour telethon in which the contributors to Coming of Age are “on” for up to 20 minutes, either talking about their contribution or being interviewed about. I thought I would produce a short video (or slidecast) for the occasion. And by short I meant short. I always set out with good intentions but they always end up 25 minutes or more. I am proud of myself. This one is 6 minutes and I think it gets the key ideas across.

If you don’t like cartoon strips or prefer reading to watching a video or just want to find out more, you can download my contribution to the book below.

Coming of Age 2.0

I’m doing a presentation on Tuesday on Learning and Knowledge Maturing. It is a bit of a mash up - some older slides from me plus some slides from Steven Downes. And it comes with full audio - I used slidecast for the first time. So trun up your speakers and press the green button (warning - about 20 minutes long). A longer post about making this will follow.

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Before Christmas, I commented at some length on the problems over Eduspace and about how communities can and should be organised. There is much to learn from the Eduspaces issue and I have spent much of the last couple of days pondering on it. The reason - a new project with very small funding from the Jisc Emerge programme.

The following abridged version of the funding application explains the aims of the project:

“1. develop an international Community of Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning Research);

2. promote a two way discourse between member of the Emerge community (and in particular Emerge projects) with members of the wider international research community;

3. provide a forum for dissemination of Users and Innovation programme funded projects;

4. develop international research teams in conjunction with User and Innovation funded projects;

5. establish a discourse between researchers and developers in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL);

6. a mutual commitment to warranting causality and exploration of international notions concepts of impact and effect of technologies on learning.

What we will do

4.1 Stage 1
Stage 1 of the project will involve a deep analysis of user needs. Given the dispersed nature of the community this will be undertaken through:

a) A web based survey of potential users.

b) Follow up in depth interviews using Skype.

The data will be subject to a user analysis focusing on gathering information in the following areas:

• what kind of people the users represent;
• the tasks and activities of users;
• understanding and insights into the user context.

This data will in turn be used to generate a scenario based User Needs Analysis. The scenario will take into account both infrastructure requirements in terms of community platforms and tools and requirements for activities.

4.2 Stage 2
Stage 2 of the project will involve the rapid prototyping of a community platform. This will be based on the existing beta Freefolio collaboration software which is already at an advance stage of maturity and being tested with three user groups.

4.3 Stage 3
Stage 3 is based on facilitating the emergence of the community.

This will include:

1. testing and evaluation of the Community platform and tools;

2. facilitation of community events. Whilst the form of the events depends to a considerable extent on the results of the User Needs Analysis it may include: on-line seminars and presentations, on-line poster sessions, on-line conferencing, research fora and the formation of virtual international work teams. .

Stage 4
Stage four will comprise the ongoing evaluation of the project activities. This will be carried out using a creative slant by adopting the collaborative community based tools as the vehicles for building the evaluation which itself will become a reflective exercise engaging both project members and the community itself.”

I will write another post over the weekend about some of the issues in implementing the project.  In the meantime if you are intersted in taking part in the project just get in touch.

I have used many different systems in the various projects I am involved in. I have used Plone, Jumbla, Elgg, Post Nuke and now am working with Wordpress. But it is still difficult to sustain communities and even more so to get members of projects to communicate effectively through different platforms.

Too often we are using the wrong tool. Why insist that people log in to a platform when all tehyw ant to do is exchange occasional emails to a list of 5 or 6 people.  On the other hand email list servers are not particualry effective in developing a pool of shared knowledge. One project I work with commissioned me to develop a ‘communication platform’. We have built a relatively lightweight platofrm for teh project using Wordpress. Yet they do not use it. One of the problems is they do not know how, I suspect. Wordpress is very easy IF you are used to using social sofwtare or blogging applications. If email and word are your main experince of using computers for communciation itis a whole new world.

And then again, I sat down this afternoon to write some ‘easy to use’ instruction on how to use teh site and for what. The how to use is difficult enough - it might be easy to shwo someone but it is quite hard to write. But the for what question was much harder. When should project partners write a blog - and why? What should they - or might they want to share? What is the forum for - and how is it difficult from the blog?

Of course the one thing they probably want most - to share files - is not particularly well supported in wordpress.  Yes, they can make a new page or blog post and add them to this. But what if they want to link to a file in the forum? Of course they can upload a file in the new post section - not publish a post and then link. But that is not so easy to explain. Ah well -will keep thinking. I am well puzzled at the moment about teh best way to support projects - anyone any ideas?

I have been pondering the implications of the demise of Eduspaces. I am not privy to the thinking or reasons why Curverider decided they could no longer support the service but it is not too difficult to understand some of what has happened. Moreover, the closure raises a number of issues of longer term significance.

Eduspaces was formerly elgg.net. Essentially when Elgg was launched elgg.net was a space for people to try out Elgg. Because the Elgg developers, Ben and Dave, came from a background in education - and the original ideas behind elgg were developed through working on ePortfolios - the major take up was in education.

Elgg took off fast - it is a very good product - and Curverider was in a dilemma. Despite a successful product they had limited infrastructure and little income. Eventually they got organised and whilst remaining committed to supporting Elgg as free Open Source software, they turned their attention to developing commercial services to provide a stable basis for their work. All very sensible. Over time, Eduspaces was floated off as a separate community. Now it appears they feel unable to continue to support what is a very different community from their core development efforts.

The big issue for me is whether when a small company develops such a product and service, it should be supported by the publicly funded education community. Whilst s0me would say this is not a role for education organisations, education does support large vendors through buying their products. Why, just because software is free and open source, should no such support mechanism exist? Of course Curverider can apply for various grant fundings. Pontydysgu works in many funded projects. Yet these projects are short term and it is hard to make enough money to survive.

Why should the edcation community support services like Eduspaces? Many would say that it is not for the education community to host and provide such services - better to leave it to the private sector. In my view we should host such services because we need to support and develop communities. Eduspaces is not just Elgg. It is a (almost unique) world community of educators. This in turn raises a new problem. Educational institutions and organisations support students and researchers in their own institution and their own country. The very strength of Eduspaces becomes its weakness. Yet if we believe in learning through communities, through open knowledge exchange, through social networks, this process cannot be left to the private market. This is the learning arena of the future. If nothing else, we need to support communities like Eduspaces as an experiment in knowledge sharing and community development. Not as a subsidy for Elgg but as a service to the education and community. And such communities should not have borders, either institutional or based on nationality.