Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

John Naughton is one of the most thoughtful of mainstream newspaper writers on new media. Although aa academic at the UK Open University, his regular Guardian newspaper column covers a wide range of different issues.

His article yesterday, entitled Welcome to the desktop degree…, predicted the end of the road for the universities in sitting back and hoping their monopoly on accreditation would guarantee an unending throughput of students.

If all the world’s stored knowledge can be accessed from any networked device, and if the teaching materials and lectures of the best scholars are likewise available online, why should students pay fees and incur debts to live in cramped accommodation for three years?

John goes on to say:

Some things have happened recently that make one think that perhaps the water might be reaching boiling point for traditional universities. The key development is a set of three courses created by Stanford University academics and colleagues in three subject areas: machine learning, database design and artificial intelligence. What makes these significant is that they are: intellectually demanding; free; presented entirely online; taught by world-class academics; and inclusive of assessment as well as tuition.

160000 students from 190 countries signed up to Stanford’s “Introduction to AI” course” , with 23000 reportedly completing.

Only three years ago there was a debate at the F-ALT fringe event at ALT-C on whether MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) were merely a passing fad. I can’t remember the results of the vote at the end of the debate but can remember that there was considerable scepticism. The truth seems to be that the MOOC model has taken hold. My only concern is that in adopting such a model for large scale commercial application by large and often private American universities, the values and dedication of people like Stephen Downes and George Siemens who pioneered the early MOOCs will be lost and such courses will just become an industrial treadmill for students.

The main reason I have been so quiet on this blog in recent weeks has been the European bidding season.

Pontydysgu receives no regular funding and although we have some small consultancy contracts and do some teaching, the majority of our income is from project work. In the past, we had considerable funding from various UK agencies, this largely dried up with the onset of the recession and government cutbacks. This, we have become more reliant on funding from the European Union.

There are two main programmes for education and training in Europe, the European 7th Framework research programme and the Lifelong Learning Programme. The Research Framework funds larger projects than the LLL, but has historically been more competitive.

For both programmes, the application process is not straightforward, requiring completion of long forms and documents. In general both programmes are targeted towards innovation, however defined, and both tend to set priorities based on current EU policy directives. Both also require multinational project partnerships. Both have been on call recently – involving many hours of work to develop proposals.

In the past, the reality was that one or perhaps two partners would prepare the project requiring only limit input from other project members. And whilst this is still sometimes the case things are changing fast. For large and c0mplex projects especially in the Technology Enhanced Learning field expertise is needed from different disciplines and from people with different knowledge and skills.

Technology for distance communication and for research has allowed the dispersed and collaborative development of project proposals to become a reality. We have recently submitted a large scale proposal to the Research Framework IST  programme on learning in Small and Medium Enterprises. This project has some 16 partners drawn from I guess around ten countries. And whilst the input and hard work of the coordinator was central to the proposal, the work was undertaken collaboratively with many of the partners making a major input.

What tools did we use? Google docs were used for collaboratively producing earlier versions of our ideas. Doodle was important for setting dates for meetings. Flashmeeting was used extensively for fortnightly meetings of partners (in the latter stages of the proposal weekly or even daily meetings became the norm). Skype was also used for bilateral meetings. And Dropbox was used as a shared file repository. Dropbox proved to be a little problematic in producing somewhat confusing conflicted copies which then has to be edited together. But overall the system worked well. I think what is important is that the tools do exist. And we do not need any big research infrastructure, rather what is needed is the imagination to share through the use of everyday productivity and social software tools.

And it seems to me that if we are able to use such tools to develop a complex and collaboratively produced research proposal, the same tools can be used for collaboration between learners or for small businesses. The barrier is not so much usability fo the applications themselves, but a willingness, understanding and appreciation of how to collaborate!

In a blog post about the BETT show in London I complained that there was little evidence about using technology for teaching and learning. And that is why I like this presentation by Helen Keegan. Whilst she looks at a whole series of web and social networking tools the whole focus is on real life use. I particularly like her advice on slide 32 – “Leave space in the course to allow space for play, emergent curricula, serendipity and opportunity.”

I am not going to provide any list of posts / apps or anything else to mark the new year. The lists are getting on my nerves. What constitutes ‘best’ anyway? I rather wonder if making lists has become a substitute for thinking? I would provide some thoughts on trends for 2012 except I not really sure what will happen. Technology is changing too fast and too unpredictably. Education economy and politics seem wrapped in a slow waltz which is also totally unpredictable in its outcomes. Indeed it may be that people and the actions of people will be more important than technology in determining the course of educational development over the next period. Or lets hope so.

But I will add a wish (not a wish list ) for 2012. My wish is that we can get rid of all those letters in from of ‘learning’. ‘e’ ,’i', ‘m’, ‘b’ and all the rest of them. I even wonder if the term ‘informal learning’ (one I am probably overly fond of using) is of much use any more.

I suspect these terms came about because we wished to signify learning by the technologies being deployed – and to a lesser extent the design of learning with technology. Yet as technology has become increasingly ubiquitous the terms have ceased to have any meaning. We don’t talk about ‘b-learning’ to refer to reading a book nor ‘c-learning’ to refer to learning in a classroom.

So lets just return to that old word – ‘learning’ – and use it to mean all the different ways in which people learn and all the different artefacts that they use in the learning process. Lest move from instructional design to designing for learning. Lets try and support learning in all the contexts in which it takes place. And lets try and support learning for everyone – not just those privileged to be enrolled on a programme in an educational institution.

As Geoff Cain says, “I was at the Open Education 2011 conference this week and David Wiley had the good sense to invite Jim Groom in to rattle cages and shake the chains. I have been reading his stuff for sometime. You can follow him on twitter here and his blog is always worth reading, but it is really a whole other experience to meet him in person. As a distance education director, I almost never say that. He is the favorite exuberant uncle who occasionally breaks the furniture. His mind is clear but his soul is mad. and here he is at his Dionysian best.”

The sound quality is sometimes a bit ropey but don’t let that put you off. Watch it all!

I was in New York last Friday presenting at a panels session at the Mobility Shifts Conference on In, Against and beyond the Institution. The panel was chaired by Mike Neary and comprised of myself, Josie Fraser, Richard Hall and Joss Winn. Somewhat surprisingly to me some 15 people turned up despite it being scheduled at se4ven o’clock on a Friday evening.

Joss presented the  Student as Producer project which re-imagines students role in the design, development, and critique of the curriculum. The process of teaching learning is decoupled from traditional power relationships so students become an integral part of the governance of an institution rather than solely its customer (there is a paper available on this written by Joss together with Mike Neary.

Richard considered how students and teachers might dissolve the symbolic power of the University into the actual, existing reality of protest, in order to engage with a process of transformation (for more see his blog).

Josie talked about the transformative aspects of digital literacy. And I looked at changing pedagogies in work based learning and developmental competence – the capacity of the individual to acquire and demonstrate the capacity to act on a task and the wider work environment in order to adapt, act and shape (design) it.

All good stuff. I found some of the ideas hard – and we certainly did not reach any conclusions. But the very fact that we are having such discussions – and the renewed interest in critical pedagogy – is testimony both of the crisis which pervades our univeristies and the growing opposition and questioning of the purpose and organisation of education including the role of researchers and teachers. To that extent I think the title – In, Against and Beyond – is helpful in linking the attempts to transform practices and roles within universities to growing protest movements outside the institutions – including the many initiatives – particularly in the UK – to explore alternative structures to the established universities.

More on this when I am less tired. in the meantime Doug Belshaw has written a  series of excellent blogs talking about some of the many wide ranging discussions which took place at Mobility Shifts.

At a presentation at a recent conference in Budapest I indulged in a short rant about the tendency to put 2.0 after everything these days. the term – if it can be called that – has lost any meaning, I said. But I do like this doodle by Jenny Hughes that I just found on the floor of our office!

We are happy to announce the launch of a new webs site, CareersTalk. The site, developed jointly between Pontydysgu and the Institute for Employment Research, Warwick University, provides access to the ongoing research and development we are undertaking into careers guidance and in particular, the use of new technology to support careers guidance. Much of this work has been undertaken with support from the EU Mature-IP and G8WAY projects.

The introduction says: “The web site is designed to provide leading-edge ideas for careers work – including information-advice-and-guidance, careers education, career counselling, mentoring, coaching, personal-and-social development, learning for well-being, for a changing world, portfolio development and individual action-planning. In particular it focuses on the use of technology for careers information, advice and guidance. Technology has already influenced, and will continue to influence, not only the ways in which guidance services are accessed by clients, but how they are used by them.”

The web site also provides links to working versions of our data visualisation tools.

Warning – this article is not based on any reliable research. However it is based on talking to a lot of people over the summer about their attitudes towards social networks and how they use them. Most of the people are working on various educational projects and are based in Europe although some were from north America and the Middle East. So in no way a representative sample but an interesting one.

Firstly there seems to be an increasing number of people who are opting out of Facebook or, if maintaining accounts, merely forwarding posts from Twitter or another social networking service. Reasons vary from Facebook privacy issues, difficulty in managing ‘friends’, social network overload, disliking the Facebook apps (Farmville is often quoted) to just feeling Facebook is a personal network not suitable for business or educational use.

Against that there seem to be a growing number of people who are separating out their use of different social networking accounts, for example using Facebook for keeping in touch with family and friends and Twitter for work.

There seem to be less people who ‘don’t get Twitter’ although against that a growing skepticism about its future with some feeling it will become increasingly taken over by commercial interests.

Many I have spoken too are thinking about the longevity of social networking services, especially free services. This seems to be increasing as so many people have invested time and effort into Flickr which they fear may be in danger due to Yahoo’s financial woes.

Google+ is the big unknown. Firstly its insistence on real names is alienating substantial numbers of social network evangelists. However, many also see its use as a business and research tool, particularly the use of circles and hangouts for project communication. However, many, like me, are struggling to maintain a presence in so many different networks!

And finally blogging. Without wishing to revive the old #F-Alt debate that micro-blogging is killing blogging, I sense a return to blogs, as offering a form and medium which can be used for substantial writing and reflection.

Regardless of feelings and preferences over individual services, there seems to be a general acknowledgement that social networking is here to say and that it is becoming an integral part of research, communication and exchange for projects and education. Probably the fastest growing services being used for project management and communication are Dropbox, Google docs and Skype.

Be interested in any of your opinions.

Badges seem to be the coming thing on the tech developers horizon. Soon we will have badges for everything. Cynical as I might be I am very interested in this Mozilla project to develop badges to recognise learning. It is really a very simple idea. The Open Badges framework, say the project developers, is designed to allow any learner to collect badges from multiple sites, tied to a single identity, and then share them out across various sites -- from their personal blog or web site to social networking profiles. The infrastructure needs to be open to allow anyone to issue badges, and for each learner to carry the badges with them across the web and other contexts.

I think the project is interesti9ng in that it recognises the increasing diversirty of learning pathways and contexts. It also recognises that in the future it is on line web presence which will for4m the primary iddentioty for a job seeker, ratehr than teh now old fashioned CV.

But rthere are still potential issues. The credibility fo the badges swil depend on the credibity of the organisationw hich issues them. And attempting to classify differents orts of badges holds many perils. I don't agree with teh distinction between badges for 'skills' and 'community /peer' badges.

but i would love to see this project rolled out - possibly linked to Open Education Resources - anyone ideas for a trial around it?