Last week Dirk, Jenny and I attended the first meeting of the European Commission IST programme Learning layers project. You are going to be hearing much more about the project on this blog, but here is a quick summary in the project’s first press release.

“With significant co-funding from the European Community, the Learning Layers project has recently started to research the role of information technologies in informal learning at the workplace. “It has been known for a long time that most learning that happens at the workplace is informal in nature”, says Tobias Ley, Professor at Tallinn University and scientific coordinator of the project, “but if we look at the learning technologies that are employed today, then most follow a very traditional model that mirrors course-based classroom learning.”

At the same time, mobile and social information and communication technologies have entered all parts of our lives. Nowadays we use them naturally to keep in contact with our friends, to seek information, to buy things and to work. There is now a realization that these emerging technologies are a key enabler to refocus efforts on informal learning, but  few companies have taken these technologies up in a systematic way to include them into their learning strategy.

So why is this? “One of the reasons is that, although informal interactions, like asking your colleague across the room for help, are very effective, they don’t scale very well beyond the immediate context”, says Tobias Ley. While the help is effective, not many others can benefit from it. Could our personal technologies provide a key for scaling up these interactions? This is what the project has set out to discover, and a number of technological solutions will be developed that should help to make this endeavor a reality. First of all, technologies need to be where informal learning really takes place. “In many prior projects, we have concentrated on people sitting at their computer desktops. In contrast, the Learning Layers Project will look at workplaces that are inherently mobile,” says Stefanie Lindstaedt, Professor at Graz University of Technology in Austria, who will be one of the main project partners for developing technologies for these settings.

The European Commission has specifically asked for proposals that benefit Small and Medium Sized Enterprises in sectors that have been less inclined in the past to take up technologies for learning. The Learning Layers project has therefore selected two very challenging application areas, the building and construction industry and the healthcare sector. Informal learning has traditionally played an important role in these sectors, but both have been hesitant to embrace learning technologies for different reasons. “With people using their personal devices, we now see a great opportunity in the building industry to connect our course offering much more directly with what people are experiencing at the workplace”, says Melanie Campbell who is representing a regional training center for the building and construction industry in Northern Germany. “Doctors work in interprofessional teams and have often learned from colleagues, technology could provide us with a way of sharing, enhancing and recording this informal learning”, says Tamsin Treasure-Jones from the Leeds Institute of Medical Education at the University of Leeds.

“Understanding the current situation in these two sectors, how they work, learn and share their knowledge, is a key priority in the project”, says Ronald Maier, Professor at the University of Innsbruck, “we will therefore conduct in-depth studies and use our findings to help improve the way people work and learn.” Based on these insights, the project will design interaction technologies to ensure that they are firmly embedded in the daily work practices, and to create new knowledge, learning and work practices that fit to the existing ones.

Apart from direct person to person interactions, such as asking colleagues, the Learning Layers project will also look at how learning materials are created informally and then increasingly shared, improved and used on a wider scale. And because people’s experiences with physical objects, like machines or materials, is crucial in the two sectors, the project will also consider how these experiences can be better exploited for learning purposes. For example, it is nowadays quite easy to make short video sequences and share them to explain how to use a certain tool.

“In order to scale up the use of these technologies, we really need to show take up in large user groups”, says Graham Attwell, Director of Pontydysgu and responsible for the project’s outreach strategy. One of the key measures the project will take is to make use of existing regional economic clusters in which enterprises are already collaborating on a whole range of activities. The project has proposed a roll-out strategy through which technologies would become part of the regional innovation and learning system, thereby reaching out to 1000 end users within the lifetime of the project.

The Learning Layers project started on 01 November 2012 with a total budget of over 12 million Euros over a four-year lifetime. Seventeen partners from Austria, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Norway, Spain, and the UK have teamed up for what will be an intense research collaboration. The project is jointly coordinated by CIMNE, a research institute in Barcelona/Spain and Tallinn University in Estonia. More information is available at http://www.learning-layers.eu.”

With the explosion of interest in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), both in numbers of courses and students, and in press reporting on the rise of MOOCs, it is worth thinking about the significance of all this. Here is a short version of five things that we have learned – a longer version (possibly) to follow.

1. There is a huge pent up demand for education. MOOCs provide free and flexible access tot hose who could not previously take part in education. That includes not only from poorer countries with a limited education infrastructure but also from rich countries. And whilst some of the demand my be due to people wishing to improve their qualification, for many others the main motivation is personal interest.
2. After a long period when Technology Enhanced Learning was seen as a supplement to traditional systems or as only for more technologically confident learners, Technology Enhanced Learning is now part of the mainstream and for many learners may be the mode or context of learning of choice.
3. Education is now a global industry. National borders are no longer a barrier to participation in on-line courses and universities are being forced into international alliances to deliver courses to a global student body. At the same time, investors see Technology Enhanced Learning as an opportunity to develop new markets and are pumping money in accordingly.
4. There does not seem to be any confidence about what the future financial market is for MOOCs. Some institutional managers see it as an way of recruiting more paying students to their university, others talk of a future market in selling accreditation.
5. The new so called X-MOOCs such as Udacity or Coursera offer little in terms of new or radical pedagogies. Instead they rely on relatively well established approaches to online learning. However, they may reflect the growing experience in developing online courses and the reduced cost and ease of production of videos and, for students, the ease of access through ubiquitous connectivity.
6. MOOCs are disruptive to the traditional university model. However such disruption may be more from globalisation and the financial crisis than from the introduction of new technologies per se.
7. Innovation comes from outside the institutions. Despite being ignored in the popular press, MOOCs were developed and pioneered by people such as Stephen Downes, George Siemens and Dave Cormier (See Stephen Downes’ MOOC blog for more). The so called c (connectivist) MOOCs were far more innovative in pedagogic approaches but the idea was taken over and adapted by the mainstream institutions once they had proved their viability and attraction.

Last week we were in Cadiz at the European Conference on Educational Research. Amongst other things, we produced three live half hour radio programmes and I will upload the podcast copies in the next two days.

Today we had an online meeting of the UK Nominet Trust funded RadioActive project. This is a great new project, using Internet radio to work with young people in Hackney in London. the idea is for them to produce their own programmes, about whatever topics interest them. And in the course of the project we hope they will learn a series of different skills and competences, including interviewing, multimedia, producing and editing music etc.

The grant included funding for equipment, which we bought at the start of the work. Of course, we wanted to make sure we had all the equipment we might need in the course of the two year project (we will post this up soon in case anyone is interested). We adopted a cascade model for training, with Pontydysgu running a two day workshop for youth workers who would be working with the young people. Of course we wanted to show the best that could be done wit such equipment, using wireless microphones, a portable mixing deck and an Apple computer to broadcast a half hour radi0 programme. Although I was not there, by all accounts the workshop was a great success.

The idea was the youth workers would follow up by running their own workshops with young people. But as sometimes happens, contracting issues crept in to delay the live launch. And by the time we were ready for working directly with young people, the youth workers were not confident about using our advanced ‘outside broadcast’ radio set up.

Although we had taken a lot of trouble to design the workshop to scaffold the learning process around skills and competences such as interviewing and designing and producing media, in the course of today’s meeting it became apparent that we had failed to scaffold the learning around the technology.

This afternoon I did a one hour on line training session (using Skype) for one of the project staff. Instead of setting up the mixing deck and wireless microphones, we started simple, using just a USB microphone plugged directly into a computer and focusing on a number of simple first steps:

We did 3 things:

1. We used GarageBand to record and edit a short voice input (if there had been more people this could have been an interview)
2. We made a simple jingle mixing a GarageBand loop with a voice over
3. We downloaded a Creative Commons licensed track from jamendo.com and edited it in Garageband to make our intro music for a programme.

We exported all of these to iTunes and then dragged them onto Soundboard. Sadly we did not have the server settings for Nicecast but if we did we could have then instantly broadcast a programme.

Now I am thinking how we can build a series of activities which both scaffold the content of what we are doing but also scaffold the technology which we use.

Of course I should have done this when we started, but I think it is indicative of a wider problem. We have been working in several projects using Web2.0 technology and social software with teachers and trainers. I think we can get over excited about the possibilities such applications offer. Then instead of focusing on the subject or topic of the learning, learning about the technology overwhelms everything else. I had a conversation with Jenny Hughes some time ago about this and she suggested (if I remember correctly) that we have a develop a dual system of scaffolding – one for the subject and a second for the technology. Of course these two scaffolds will overlap at some point.

I have seen a number of attempts to develop schema or even applications which suggest the best software or apps for any particular learning task but am unconvinced they work or even that this approach is possible. In most cases there will be many different technologies which could be used. I am far more impressed by the format and structure adapted by the Taccle2 project, in which Pontydysgu are a partner. This project focuses directly on teaching and learning and the technology is an enabling factor, rather than the ’50 great apps for learning’ approach so prevalent today.

i will write more on this but would be interested in any feedback / ideas.

Hi Graham, writes Tess Pajaron from the Australian Open Colleges, “My name is Tess and I am an avid reader of your blog. I read an article you did about online learning and Technology Integration in the Classroom and I thought that you can make use of this infographic that we just developed.  You can check it out here: http://newsroom.opencolleges.edu.au/learning-analytics-infographic/.

Please do let me know what you think. And if you can feature it on your blog, I’d be really thrilled! :D”

Its a good infographic and I am happy to feature it. Personally I am somewhat sceptical about learning analytics, but others in Pontydsygu are keener and we certainly want to find out more. And we are always happy to feature reader submitted content (as long as you are not a bot!).

This years meme at ed-tech conferences is disruption. There seems to be two opposing discourses. One says that education is not in a period of disruption – rather that the system is evolving to take account of the possibilities that technology offers for teaching and learning.

The other says we are entering a period of disruption with the existing system fundamentally unable to respond to needs and that the take up of technology will lead to fundamental change. The rush to deliver and accredit MOOCs is seen as the tipping point.

I think both sides are wrong. Firstly there are massive differences in different countries. Whilst there is little doubt of the speed of change, uncertainty and even disruption in the US and UK higher education sectors, in Germany and the Netherlands, for example, life seems to be going on as before.

What this suggest to me is that it is not technology as such that is the major factor in disruption. Rather it is social and ideological drivers which are leading to the more apocalyptic scenarios. We probably have reached a tipping point in that the use of technology for learning is becoming mainstream. And the availability of high quality learning opportunities outside the classroom means that educational institutions can know longer claim a monopoly on learning or knowledge. Equally the power of smart phones is opening up new contexts for learning. Of course these developments will lead to changes – particularly in pedagogy – within institutions.

But the promise of such developments is to extend education to all who wish to learn, rather t5han the present minority who are able to access higher education.

But this i9s a political and social decision. Technology can be used in many different ways – for good and for bad, In the US and in the UK the technology argument is being used as part of an ideological drive to extend the remit of capital to include education – in other words to privatise education. And of course the new private institutions will be  driven primarily by the need to make a profit – rather than by pedagogical imperatives.

Lets look again at MOOCs. the early MOOCs – now known as c-MOOCs – were developed by people like Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Dave Cormier and Jim Groom. The idea of massive open online courses was not to make money. Quite the reverse : they were struggling to find models to sustain the programmes. They were motivated by the idea of new pedagogical approaches to using technology for learning.

Now MOOCs have been picked up by the mainstream system. Coursera is an international consortium of elite universities using a proprietary platform to deliver free online courses. Apart from their use of video these courses are somewhat traditional in their pedagogic approach. At last weeks EFQUEL conference, Jeff Haywood, Vice Principal of Knowledge Management at Edinburgh university, a founder member of the Coursera consortium, was quite explicit about their interest in MOOCs. We are there to make money, he said. And if we do not make money within four years we will close the MOOCs down (it is worth reading Audrey Watters extremely amusing account of the education session at the TECHCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco earlier this week).

Same technology – but very different pedagogic approach and motivation. So it is not technology per se which is the driving force behind the great disruption. Rather it is the economic crisis and political and ideological responses to that crisis. As a society should we be retaining free education and investing in education as a response to the fall in productivity and high levels of unemployment. Or should be be seeking to cut back by privatising education? That is the real debate.

The nine steps are useful. But possibly more interesting in this presentation by George Siemens is his analysis of the difference between so called c-MOOCs and X-MOOCS.

Over the years I have had a fair bit of interest, in this diagramme, produced in a paper for the the e-Portfolio conference in Cambridge in 2005.

I has some discussion about it with Gemma Tur at the PLE2012 Conference in Aveiro. And now Gemma, who is writing her doctoral dissertation in ePortfolios, has written to me to remind me of our discussion. Gemma says:

I thought I could add that eportfolios built with web 2.0 tools may have another process which is based on networking. Cambridge (2009, 2010) argues about the construction of two selves, the networked self and the symphonic self. The first is about documenting learning quickly, in everyday life, taking brief notes with short and quick reflection, sharing and networking. The second is about presenting learning, reorganizing learning, linking learning evidence, with longer and more profound reflection… no networking in this final stage, as it is an inner process

As I am working with learning eportfolios, with web 2.0 tools, networking is a learning process for my students. Therefore, they are building their networked self.

So, if I argue networking is an eportofolio process of web 2.0 eportfolios, who owns the process? Looking at your article and your illustration, I thought it could be a process owned by both the learner and the external world. If networking is a process of sharing, visiting, linking, connecting, commenting, does it mean that it involves both the learner and the audience? this is what I thought before you told me that it is the learner’s process for sure.

So do you think that definitely I should argue that it is only owned by the learner? Then although it could need someone else to comment and connect, in fact, the act of networking is the student’s responsibility? is this the reason why you think that?, do you think I should argue it is owned by the learner?

These are interesting discussion impacting on wider areas than ePortfolios. In particular I think the issue of control is important to the emerging MOOC discussion.

Returning to Gemma’s questions – although I have not read the paper – I don’t think I agree with Cambridge’s idea of he networked self and the symphonic self – at least in this context. I think that networking becomes more important when presenting learning, reorganizing learning, linking learning evidence, and longer and more profound reflection. these processes are inherently social and therefore take place in a social environment.

However it is interesting that social networking was hardly on the radar as a learning process in 2005. And when I referred to the ‘external world’ I was thinking about external organisations – qualification and governmental bodies, trade unions and employers rather than broad social networks. Probably the diagramme needs completely redrawing to reflect the advent and importance of Personal Learning Networks.

However, despite the fact that personal social networks exist in the external world (the ‘audience’), I think the owner of the process is the learner. AZnd I would return again to Ilona Buchems study of the psychological ownership of Personal learning Environments. Ilona says:

One of most interesting outcomes of the study was the relation between control and ownership. The results show that while perceived control of intangible aspects of a learning environment (such as being able to determine the subject matter or access rights) has a much larger impact on the feeling of ownership of a learning environment than perceived control of tangible aspects (such as being able to choose the technology).

Personal Learning Networks are possibly the most important of the intangible aspects of a learning environment. The development of PLEs (which I would argue come out of the ePortfolio debate) and the connectivist MOOCs are shifting control from the educational institutions to the elearners and possibly more important from institutions to wider communities of practice and learning. Whilst up to now, institutions have been able to keep some elements of control (and monopoly through verifying, moderating, accrediting and certifying learning, that is now being challenged by a range of factors including open online courses, new organisations such as the Social Science Centre in Lincoln in the UK and Open Badges.

Such a trend will almost inevitably continue as technology affords ever wider access to resources and learning. The issue of power and control is however unlikely to go away but will appear in different forms in the future.

In previous years, local authorities have been asked to block access to social networking sites in schools, libraries and youth clubs, as a result of very understandable concerns about online predators, cyberbullying and the risk of disruption to classroom activities. However, this policy can have adverse effects. It deprives schools of access to tools and resources which might otherwise be used creatively and constructively in education both within and beyond the classroom. More importantly, it means that children are most likely to be using these sites outside the school, at home, or on mobile devices, in environments which may be unsupervised and where they have less access to informed guidance and support on how to stay safe online.
In 2008, Wales was the first country in the UK to introduce the teaching of safe and responsible use of the Internet into both the primary and secondary school curriculum. The underpinning approach was that we first teach children to use the Internet safely under supervision, and then help them to develop the skills and understanding they need to manage their own risk as they use the Internet independently. Enabling access to social networking sites in schools will be consistent with this approach, providing pupils with the opportunity to learn safe, responsible and considerate online behaviours in the context of supported educational activities. It will also help schools to include parents in these activities.”

We have long argued that blocking of social networking (and other web sites) in schools was a backward and futile step. Lets hope that other countries follow the lead of Wales.

The UK Open University have launched an interesting new series, Innovating Pedagogy. The series of reports is intended to explore new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation.

Mike Sharples explains:

We wanted to distinguish our perspective from that of the EDUCAUSE Horizon reports, which start from a consideration of how technologies may influence education. I would argue that ours aren’t ‘technology-driven opportunities’, but are rather an exploring of new and emerging forms of teaching, learning and assessment in an age of technology. All innovations in education nowadays are framed in relation to technology, but that doesn’t mean they are ‘technology driven’. So, for example, personal inquiry learning is mediated and enhanced by technology, but not driven by it.

We had a long discussion over ‘pedagogies’. The problem is that there isn’t a word in English that means ‘the processes of teaching, learning and assessment’. I would argue that in current usage ‘pedagogy’ has broadened from a formal learning experience conducted by a teacher, as we have become more aware of the opportunities for peer learning, non-formal apprenticeship etc. See e.g. http://www.memidex.com/pedagogy+instr . The origin of the word isn’t ‘teacher’ but “slave who took children to and from school” We were careful to indicate in the Introduction our usage of the word: “By pedagogy we mean the theory and practice of teaching, learning, and assessment.” So, within that usage are practices that might contribute towards effective learning, such as creating and sharing annotations of textbooks.

The ten trends explored in the first report are:

• Assessment for learning
• Badges to accredit learning
• Learning analytics
• MOOCs
• New pedagogy for e-books
• Personal inquiry learning
• Publisher led mini-courses
• Rebirth of academic publishing
• Rhizomatic learning
• Seamless learning

Although the list may seem as little idiosyncratic, authors emphasise that the themes are often interlinked in practice. I wonder though, if there is something of a contradiction between Assessment for Learning and Learning Analytics?

I am also interested in the definition of rhizomatic learning: “supporting rhizomatic learning requires the creation of a context within which the curriculum and knowledge are constructed by members of a learning community and which can be reshaped in a dynamic manner in response to environmental conditions. The learning experience may build on social, conversational processes, as well as personal knowledge creation, linked into unbounded personal learning networks that merge formal and informal media.”

I am fascinated by the growing use of visualisations (although my own efforts to date are less than impressive).

Anyway, I very much liked this visualization which is the result of a collaboration between the design for learning experts TFE Research and emerging technology strategist Michell Zappa. They say: “this visualization attempts to organize a series of emerging technologies that are likely to influence education in the upcoming decades. Despite its inherently speculative nature, the driving trends behind the technologies can already be observed, meaning it’s a matter of time before these scenarios start panning out in learning environments around the world.”

You can download a high resolution copy of the poster from their site.