Pontydysgu - Bridge to Learning Pontydysgu.org

it has been a busy week. From Thursday to Saturday I was in Braga speaking at a conference for teachers on Web 2.0 technologies for learning. About 250 teachers turned up and worked until eight in the evening. I greatly enjoyed myself (fabulous hospitality) and was impressed by the level of commitment. I also greatly enjoyed the chance ot chat with George Siemens who was also presenting at the conference. More later this week on some of the ideas we discussed.

Back to Portugal. According to Reuters “Portugal’s Socialist government began the roll-out on Tuesday of 500,000 ultra-cheap laptops for school children in a programme that could be extended to Venezuela, the government said.

“The government’s educational technology plan aims to make Portugal one of the top five most technologically advanced countries in Europe,” it said.

Portugal has some of the lowest school achievement levels in western Europe and Socrates has made boosting education a key priority. The government hopes the Magellan project will raise computer access at schools to two students per computer by 2010, up from five this year.

While the computer will be assembled in Portugal by a company called JP Sa Couto, it is based on Intel’s Classmate PC, a cheap computer that has been adopted in various formats in countries such as Brazil and Indonesia.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has visited Portugal several times in the past year and is due in Lisbon later this week, has said the Magellan could also be used in Venezuelan schools.”

I was aprticually impresed at the conference with ideas for using computers with younger children. But of coures there are worries. I have no doubt that the kids will know how to use teh computers. But there needs to be a big programme of professional development to ensure the teachers udnerstand how to use teh computers for learning if the full value of the programmee is to be realsied.

Continuing the open learning debate….I greatly like this diagramme by George Siemens. I think there is much of merit here. Very happpy to see acknowledgemnt of the importance of self publishing (as opposed to academic reporsitories). However there are a few things missed out.

Firstly if we take congniscence of Jenny Hughes’ defintion of learning as ‘to find and follow a track’ as counterposed to curriculum  from the latin ‘currere’, which means to run or race and ‘curriculum’ as race or racecourse, then instotutions and teacher have an important role in assisting learners in developing their own learning pathways.

A second important  role is that of assessment. But to understand this we need to decouple assessment from acceditation. If we design assessment as a learning process and move from assessemnt of learning to asssessement for learning this could become an integral part of the process of finding and developing learning pathways. This is not so utopian. Serendipitously. The Times newpaper today published an article about innovative assessment in UK universities. The struggle, though, as with self and peer assessment is in assessment having to match accreditation procedures. Without this link, we could open up all jinds of new forms of assessment.

A final point on accreditation. Many learners do not want or require accreditation. Indeed it is the formal accreditation procedures which deters them for signing up for a learning programme. And as Antnio Fini, talking about the home made certificate he got from the OpenEd2007 course, says: “all my connections, blog posts, comments, collective works, presentations, articles related to that experience, are still out there as tangible proofs of this learning. So I could equally put the OpenEd course in my CV and could ask to my supervisor to evaluate all that activity for credit in my PhD, also without that piece of paper!”

Why not put the learners in charge of accreditation. Lets leave it to them to decide how they wish to show what and how they have learned - albeit with support. I once co-ran a course with Jenny Hughes where we offered the particpants their certificate at the start of the courese. They refused! But it did raise the issue of why they were doing the course and how they valued learning. And that is an issue we need to bring to the fore.

First we had open educational resources. This was a step forward but the resources were variable in quality, hard to find and were often tied to courses which made them hard to use for self study. Those issues haven’t gone away but improvements in search technologies and a wider general conciousness about the value of self publishing open resources means it is increasingly easy to find what you want.

And now we are witnessing an explosion in open learning. Of course there are the big publicity happenings like the CCK08 Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)  organised by Stephen Downes and George Siemans on connectivism.

But more important is the flowering of opportunties for learning from many, many diverse sources. One of the best things about Twitter is it opens access to many events going on and opportunities to partiucpate at a distance. Last week I dropped in on a TeachMeet session being organised as part of the Scottish Learning Festival. Someone had ’shouted it out” in Twitter, I followed the link and ended up in a broadcast over the UK Open Universities free Flashmeeting service. There was about twenty or so of us particpating online. Whilst the quality of the video sometimes left something to be desired (and I was stuggling to follow Glaswegian accents) this was more than made up for by the quality and humour in the online chat.

Yesterday morning I recieved this in my email: “You have a live session today with cristinacost on ‘Connecting Online : Sharing Life’s Experiences’. The session will start at 10:00 AM W. Europe Standard Time and is 60 minutes long.”  This is a free course being organised in the WizIQ environment. Sadly I am bogged down in administration and had no time to go. But over the last year there has been an explosion of such open courses and seminars. We are organising one such series oursleves through the Jisc Evolve project.

And this morning Cristina Costa showed me her online bookclub “Living Literature though Exploration.” This more than anything impresses me as to how we have moved towards real open learning through Web 2.0 tools (in this case as simplle as a shared blog and some bookmarks.

However there remain a number of issues.

The last barrier to open learning - and a very complex one - is that of accreditation. Whilst I am sceptical about the Connectivism MOOC, it is raising a number of central questions about open learning, not least that of accreditation. Under the Connectivism course model, only 34 (I think) sdtudents are offically enrolled for accreditation and therefore pay fees. Their fees pay for the costs of the course which is open and free to everyone else. As part of this they get feedback form tutors on course assignments and accreditation at the end of the course. How important is this for learning? And would it be possible for a student to develop a portfolio based on particpation in the course and then claim accreditation elsewhere? Are we moving to a model where learning is open but institutions have a major role in accrediting that learning (presumably through a portfolio model)? Can we develop a concept of open accreditation? And what would that mean?

Jenny Hughes has been undertaking the thankless task of trying to edit (or more to rewrite) an article of mine on Personal Learning Environments as part of a handbook for teachers for the Taccle project.

I am intrigued by her reference ot the orgins of the words ‘curriculum’ and ‘learning’ in this excerpt from the draft:

“Traditionally, knowledge has been conceived of something possed by ‘experts’ . The formal education curriculum is based on the idea that learning can be neatly and conveniently divided into subject areas which in turn are based on traditional university disciplines.  The people who have the knowledge (the teachers) are accorded higher status than those that do not (the learners) and although all good teachers maintain that they learn a lot from their pupils, the passage of information is conceived as being one-way. There are desgnated places (schools) where learning officially takes place, where learning is tested and  which control access to the next stage or level of learning

The new technologies have challenged this status quo.  The explosion of freely available sources of information has increased the range of knowledge available to people and has made it accessible when and where they want it, in bite sized chunks that do not necessarily form a coherent subject discipline.

We are moving from the idea of knowledge being developed and controlled by experts to collaborative knowledge construction which can be facilitated by the use of social software, as we describe above. Even more importantly, we are starting to rethink what qualifies as ‘knowledge’.  Instead of the ‘curriculum’ being defined by experts, communities of people interested in the same things – or even just by being part of a community – are acting as a curriculum.

Interestingly, the word curriculum comes from the latin ‘currere’, which means to run or race and ‘curriculum’ was a race or racecourse. It is easy to see how this was adopted to describe a learning course which had a starting point, travelled along a straight route and reached a finishing point with competitors battling with each other to finish first or to be the best.

Maybe for the first time learning has stopped being a race course. Conversely ‘to learn’ originally meant ‘to find and follow a track’  and this seems to sum up rather well the current shift in emphasis from formal curriculum to informal learning.

This changing model requires not only different approaches but different technologies and implicit is the change from an institutional approach to learning to a more learner centred approach.”

Great Evolve seminar on Personal Learning Environments last night (you can see the recording here - if this link fails click here and go to Monday 22). What came through clearly was that PLEs are primariy a social and political issue. As I write this Scott Wilson who presented at the seminar has just twittered “scottbw PLE - Its quite tricky keeping the social and technical interventions both in focus at the same time.” But that is exactly what we have to do. A focus on the technical without taking up the social and politcial will fail. I would go even further to say it is the social and polictical fcus of what we wish to achieve in modelling a new vision of our education and learning systems which should be driving technicl development. I see so many technical presentations which leave me wondering - ’so what’. And as Francis Bell rightly said last night we need to evaluate and understand the impact of previous generations of technology implementation on education and learning. But I also think many of us are hiding behind technology and failing to express our true wishes which are to reshape the way we learn in our societies.

Now may be the time to open such a debate. The PLE discussions have been instrumental in revealing many of the systemic tensions in education and traning provision. Now we need to start to articulate a new agenda and to consider how we can shape techncial development to support such a vision.

So much seems to have been written about F-Alt - the fringe conference organised at ALT-C this year - that it almost pointless to say more (see links on the F-Alt wiki and on the #FAlt08 Twemes page). But I would like to add some words about the learning processes.

First of all the organisation. F-Alt did not have any formal organising body in the normal sense. But it did have organsiation and leadership in the sense that individuals took responsibility for doing things. This relied on a high degree of community and of trust and possibly refects the emergence of a community of practice aorund the use of ICT for learning which has perhaps been lacking before. Maintaining community openess and willingness to remain emergent are challenges for the future.

Th technologies worked pretty well. The Wet Paint wiki offers a quick way to develop a collaborative organising platform. Twitter was pretty useful for getting the word out although it would have been better if Twemes had been restored earlier and we had been able to publicise our tag.

The big success fo me was the format. Running short, sharp and issue focused sessions - no speakers were allowed more than three minutes - allowed both a focus n those topics particpants wanted to discuss and also, critically, highly participative events. None of us knew the venue in advance and we expropriated public spaces. Whilst this did pose problems in terms of people knowing where events would be and in somewhat distractive background noise levels (30 of us discussed e-Portolfios around a poolt table in the corner of a pub!) it also kept us focused on the wider conference and communiy environment in which we are working. Perhps there is a learning lesson for organsers of ‘official’ confernces. There are plenty of formats other than the stand and tell - or stand and powerpoint - followed by three or four questions. Lets try and innovate. I would also like to see experiments with ‘blended conferences’ where presentations can take place online and face to face sessions used to discuss, debate and challenge around the issues and possibly produce new resources and outcomes.

I am sure that others will replicate the sucess of F-Alt and we will see more such fringe happenings in the future. This raises the question of the relationship between conference organisers and the fringe. In many ways F-Alt was all the better for being not associated officially with Alt-C. But, I believe F-Alt provided added value to the conference and thus such events should be encouraged by confernce organisers. But raher than endorsing or officially supporting such Fringe activities, better could be to provide open spaces where such activities might take place. In other words, to accept that unconferencing is what is says and is not part of the conference, but a useful, complimentary and parallel activity. As such it could be good if conference organisers were to provide times and spaces where such activities could take place - not just for F-Alt bu for anyone with a burning issue to discuss.

One of the first of a series of ctach up posts from the last two weeks of wall to wall conferences and meetings.

For a long time I have been complaining at the ludicrous policies that ban students from using small powerful mobile computers - yes telephones. And now - in the UK at least - there does seem to be some movement. Remarkably, this article is from the online version of the Daily Mail - which as UK readers will appreciate is not normally a fan of anything progressive!

“Children should be allowed to use their mobile phones in class because they can serve as ‘learning aids’, a study claims today.

Academics are calling on schools to rethink bans on phone handsets after trials suggested that functions such as calculators, stopwatches and email can be ‘educational’………

During a nine-month experiment involving classes aged 14 to 16, pupils either used their own mobiles in lessons or the new generation of ‘ smartphones’ which allow internet connection.

They were used to create short films, set homework reminders, record a teacher reading a poem and time experiments with the phones’ stopwatches.

The smartphones also allowed pupils to access revision websites, log into the school email system, or transfer electronic files between school and home.

The study by researchers at Nottingham University involved 331 pupils in schools in Cambridgeshire, West Berkshire and Nottingham……

‘After their hands-on experience, almost all pupils said they had enjoyed the project and felt more motivated.’

One teacher told researchers that students like mobiles and they know how to use them.

‘Using this technology gives them more freedom to express themselves without needing to be constantly supervised,’ the teacher said. ……..

Dr Hartnell-Young said: ‘While the eventual aim should be to lift blanket bans on phones, we do not recommend immediate, whole-school change.

‘Instead we believe that teachers, students and the wider community should work together to develop policies that will enable this powerful new learning tool to be used safely.’”

A good start but the reactions to the artcile on the web site were far from progressive. Whether this refelcts where teachers or at or just mirrors the Daily Mail readership is hard to say:

“Mobile phones will be used for “learning”? Does that follow on from the Internet not being used for downloading porn or computers not being used for playing games? Flimsy research from a bunch of nutters who want to look hip and with it.

- Maggie, Oxford, 4/9/2008 4:09″

“Appalling idea. People are completely ruled by their mobiles. It will cause more bullying and stealing of popular phones. Leave mobile phones at home.

- Sue, Southampton, 4/9/2008 7:49″

“Whoever came up with this waste of money study - needs to be sacked. Where did they get their information from - a text message?

- Don, UK, 4/9/2008 8:03″

And so on. But it is a crack in the system and cracks can be widened. Whilst on the subject of mobiles there is a great post on the Blog of Proximal Development about the Teachers Without Borders ICT Workshop in Capetown.  Konrad Glogowski quotes a teacher saying “I understand what you mean about engagement. When my students ask me, ‘Miss, what does this word mean?’ I tell them to take out their cell phones and find out for themselves. I want them not to always ask me.”

Seems teachers in the UK have some catching up to do!

This post provides a summary of how you can particpate in the Alt-C conference wherever you are.

It’s the Adanveced Learning Technologies (ALT) conference this week in Leeds in the UK. Together with Cristina Costa I will be reporting from the conference on the Pontydysgu blogs.

In the past if you couldn’t spare the time, forgot to submit your abstract and thus had no institutional support for the conference fees or just couldn’t face another four days of papers and workshops, that would be it. No conference, no networking. The times they are a changing. First we have all manner of distance communications. And secondly we are beggining to loosen up in our ides of how knowledge is shared with the grwing popularity of technology enhanced unconferencing. AltC is not open to all this year. But there are events you can participate in wherever you are and differents spaces to interact with conference delegates.

First a plug for Sounds of the Bazaar. We are broadcasting LIVE from the Jisc Emerge social at Alt-C on Tuesady at 1725 UK summer time, 18.25 Central European time. Sit back and relax (perhaps with a glass of wine yourself) and listen to what the party goers are saying.  Just point your browser to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u This should open in your MP3 player of choice and after a few seconds delay start streaming. Better still, if you’d like to join in the fun, you can join our conference special chat room and share your opinions with others. You can also ask questions to the people being interviewed. Cristina Costa will be moderating the chat LIVE at Leeds at the following url - http://tinyurl.com/soundschat - no account needed.

What else is going on? Alt-C themselves have go in on the act and are providing access to the keynote speeches through Elluminate. Just head  over here to get the full details. Alt has provided a Crowdvine social network site for the conferrnce. Sadly that is only open to registered delegates. But there is an open aggregator here (or download an OPML file with the aggregator RSS feeds).

F-Alt is the first ever fringe being held at Alt-C. It sounds like it is going to be a lot of fun. You can get full details on the F-Alt wiki. There’s a chance that sessions may be broadcast live on ustream. Keep watching on twitter for more details. You can find a FriendFeed aggregator here.

Last but not least, the Alt-C Digital Divide slam is open to all. Full details on the wiki. Go on - its much more fun than that report you should be writing. Create your own entry.

I am sure there will be more. Just hang out in the right spaces to find out what is going on. Or, of course, you can watch this blog for regular conference updates.

This was recorded live at the EduMedia conference in Salzburg. Many thanks to Andreas Auwarter who recorded the audio and did the post processing.

I accepted an invitation to do a keynote presentation at a conference on Web 2.0 at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal on October 10th. What I dinn’t realise is that they wanted me to write a paper. I am not so keen on formal papers these days - I far prefer multimedia but I finally got down to it. I greatly enjoyed readng up for he paper and quite enjoyed writing it - though am frustrated at all the things I did not say. And I still find the academic text format a bit stifling. Oh - and I hated doing the referencing (though that is my fault - I should have done it as I wrote). Anyway here is the paper. I am trying to out in scribd to see if this makes sense as a way of blogging a paper.

If you prefer you can download the paper here - portplesfin