Pontydysgu - Bridge to Learning Pontydysgu.org

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.

Lots of fun at the Edumedia conference in Salzburg. Somehow managed to speak at the same session as Jay Cross. With the two of us on the attack I think some participants thought they had strayed into a meeting of dangerous revolutionaries.

And I just about managed to get something going with twemes. Twemes is an aggregator of twitter, delicious and flickr working on a unique tag. The tag for the conference is #edumedia08. OK there was not enough bandwidth for accessing the web and both my phone and camera ran out of power.

But I could connect to skype and the ever knowledgeable Cristina Costa told me of a skype-twitter interface and it worked. Some eight of us at the conference have been using the tag. You can follow the tweme at http://twemes.com/edumedia08. I must say I like the mix of languages.

On the train this morning I read ta new paper by Dave Cormier entitled “Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum (note - free access but you will have to create an account). thsi is a great article and I will return to some of the ideas Dave raises later this week. But I like very much the idea of community as curriculum. Dave says

“In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning..”

And that is what I am trying to do in Salzburg.

It is hecti8c here at the Pontydysgu office. We are lining up a great summer of activities, radio broadcast and events. And here is the first. Announcing the the launch of the Evolve Community.

The Evolve project is organising a series of international on-line events and seminars.

The objectives are:
• To provide a space for participant driven discussion and debate
• To promote critical inquiry and discourse
• To allow for the presentation of ideas in progress
• To share expertise, ideas and future thinking around common research agendas

The first event will take place this Fraiday May 30 at 1700 GMT (For other time zones please check here: http://tinyurl.com/5gzysk.

The Venue for the presentation is in Elluminate - http://tinyurl.com/6emm9f (no Password required)

Barbara Dieu has agreed to be the Keynote speaker for our first event, which is organized around the following theme: Social software in Schools and Institutions. Barbara’s presentation is entitled Social Media in Engiahs Langauge Teaching.

We will also be hosting a topical activity around the monthly themes. See how to get involved here: .

And don’t forget to get your own freefolio spot. You just need to create an account! Go to http://www.evolvecommunity.org

We hope you join us. This is will be a great chance to network, to get to know what other people are doing, and also to share your work and ideas.

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.

I think I am doing a keynote presentation on May 7th at the Swedish Agency for Flexible Learning. Think - well it is arranged but their emails are bouncing, they are not answering their phones and skype cannot find their account. Small technical problems!

Anyway, Pelle Filipsson, who works for the Agency, was kind enough to leave a comment on my blog this morning. he invited me to look at his blog, which, of course, I did. And I found an interesting post on informal learnng, with which I totally disagree. So, in the interests of a little debate and discourse in advance of my arrival in Stockholm, here is my reply.

Pelle says: “A somewhat hyped expression the last few years is “informal learning”. I have heard it, used it and at last I came to think about what it really means. “Informal” in popular adult education is a welcome and positive way to regard learning. You learn everywhere, in any situation. It is a central aspect of the sociocultural learning theories too. But what do I learn? When I get really drunk at the pub I learn something, apparently. When I watch a stupid youtube clip for the tenth time too? But how do I experience that I have learned something? How do I measure that learning? How do I know how to use the experience and the things learned?

And what can schools and learning institutions use from the informal learning? That it is a good idea to start teaching at discoteques? (A metaphore to what is going on in every social network on the web at the moment)

A fight broke out in the blogosphere when Bill Brantley went through Jay Crosses book “Informal learning“. Here are some qoutes:

“Informal learning is just another hype-filled, buzzword that pretends to be a radical change from the past but is really bits-and-pieces of other learning methods badly packaged.”

“Cross’ definition of informal learning is so wide open it can mean almost anything.”

Of course not every activity results in learning. But I do have to say some of my best learning has come from pubs. There is a problem that my handwriting does tend to degenerate over a long evening and I sometimes cannot make out what I write the next morning. I wonder why pubs can be such a good source of learning. Could it be in the intensity of a face to face dialogue which is so often missing in formal conferences and seminars?

I think the more serious challenge especially when looking at the use of the internet, is to distinguish between accessing information and learning. I learn little from the long time I spend searching for aircraft routes to different places in Europe (except perhaps how poor the design of so many e-commerce sites is - interestingly the cheap airlines usually have the best sites). But I learn a lot from almost random surfing. How? Often through thinking about what people are saying and clarifying my own views. I could hardly say that reading Fellipe’s post is a formal learning experience. But it has certainly caused me to pause and think.

In the ICT and SME project, which looked at the use of computers for learning in Small and Medium Enterprises in six different European projects (you can download the book of the project here), we found few instances of formal learning. But computers were being used extensively for all sorts of different activities. We considered whether these activities could be considered as learning. In many cases we concluded they could. Why? Activities identified through the project case studies were:

• Purposeful
• Heavily influenced by context
• Often resulted in changes in behaviour
• Were sequenced in terms of developing a personal knowledge base
• Problem driven or driven by personal interest
• Social – in that they often involved recourse to shared community knowledge bases through the internet and / or shared with others in the workplace

In my view such criteria clearly differentiate learning from the acquisition of information. And this is a widespread activity. So, Pelle, not hype at all. But probably the main way people learn.

It is already time for another edition of Sounds of the Bazaar.

This issue features a round table discussion with Jaan Netzow, from IBM Germany, Gareth Greenwood, IBM UK, and Bert de Coutere, IBM Belgium. All are involved in one way or another with the development, sales and support of software for collaboration - particularly in the workplace. Can IBM applications replace Facebook as a ‘managed social network?’ Should managers have the right to change employees’ personal profiles. All this and more in this round table.

The Sound of the Bazaar interview is with Rebecca Stromeyer. Rebecca has been involved with organising Online Educa Berlin since the start - in 1994. In the interview she tells of the origins of the conference and talks about what she enjoys about it all.

Website of the Month features the European Collaboration for Innovation project. And - this is a little embarassing - just at the moment we don’t have the url for the project to hand. But if you do want the url please visit us again when we have updated this page.

As ever thanks to Dirk Stieglitz - from stray hints in emails I gather that I made a mess of recording this issue and he had a bit of a technical struggle. And thanks to Beate Kleessen from ICWE for help in planning SoB this autumn and to Agnes Breitkopf from IBM for setting up the round table

 

 Listen to the full edition [43:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (108)

 

 Introduction to the show - Graham Attwell [1:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (101)

 

 e-Collaboration - an IBM Round Table [16:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (108)

 

 Web Site of the Month [7:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (100)

 

 Online Educa - the past and the future with Rebecca Stromeyer [12:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (102)

 

 Extro to the programme - Graham Attwell [2:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (107)

I’m in a bar in Sofia - grabbing a bit of bandwidth. And in comes this interesting email.

“Dear Dr. Attwell,” it says, (thanks for the Doctorate, I am a sucker for flattery), “I am a producer for the Spanish Americas Section of the BBC World Service. I am writing an article about Online Educa Berlin and I would like to have a telephone interview with you about Podcasting.

The idea is to talk about Podcasting as a tool for learning, what is the potential and the future of the tool, the plus and the minus points.”

Well how could I refuse. But I thought it might be time to do a little research about podcasts, as opposed to just making them. I remembered the excellent Impala project - I have an interview with one of the project researchers, Ming Nie, due out next week. The IMPALA project, funded by the UK Higher Education Academy, is investigating the impact of podcasting on student learning and how the beneficial effects can positively be enhanced.

Perhaps more interestingly, the IMPALA partners are experimenting with a range of pedagogical models to address specific challenges in teaching and learning.

I searched around the various project web sites, wikis, blogs and presentations. I am not sure about their first attempt at a model - it seems to me overly media / technology prescriptive. But some of the work looking at the pedagogic use of podcasts is very useful.

In a paper presented at a JISC Workshop on Innovative E‐Learning with Mobile and Wireless Technologies, they say podcasts can be used:To support online learning and to integrate other e‐learning activities – a profcast model

In a presentation at Alt C, 2007 Ming Nie says podcasting can “facilitate collaborative learning and skills development through dialogue (Allen, 2005; Laurillard, 2002;Wenger, 1998).
Ming Nie goes on to say podcasting can be used to “Capture Informal Knowledge, Experience, feelings, viewpoints through conversation, discussion, debate. Podcasting is Personal, interesting and engaging.”

From conversations with e-learning researchers and practitioners in the corporate sector, I think education is behind in this. Many large companies are already using podcasting to develop and capture informal learning. the problem with education is it isn’t quite sure about informal learning. Yes it is there. yes, it is probably a good thing. But do we really want to sanction knowledge acquisition which takes place outside of the classroom or the VLE and outside the approved sanction of the official curriculum.

How ironic. I was waiting for a telephone call to IBL to talk about a discussion for Sounds of the Bazaar podcast on collaborative learning. And my eye caught this article from the Guardian technology page.

“More than 1,700 public employees have been sacked or disciplined for internet or email misuse in the past three years, our research has found.

The figures - obtained from 65 institutions - show how strongly employers are clamping down on staff who spend hours on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

Unions say that disputes over the sites are growing at a phenomenal rate and have demanded clearer guidelines for their use. Studies have shown that up to £130m a day in productivity is lost because of the sites, with Facebook’s British members spending an average of 143 minutes a month logged in.”

And I went on to have a great talk with Jaan and Agnes from Berlin about how e-collaboration tools can enhance learning - especially informal learning, boost productivity and promote innovation.

But it seems UK employers just don’t get it. To a large extent it is a question of trust - the very issue I talked with Jay Cross about in an interview a few weeks ago. Informal learning is the most powerful route to competence development and innovation in the workplace. But informal learning means trusting employees - trusting employees to usefully use their time, trusting employees to make decision, trusting employees to try out new ideas.

The public sector is probably the worst place for trust. In many organizations public sector workers are not even entitled to send emails without prior approval. Supervision rules. Why? The work culture of the public sector is still all too often rooted in Fordist ideas of production. Knowledge is carefully filtered and controlled. Strict hierarchies prevail.

I ‘m not sure even researchers and those who defend the workers get it. From the same article: “Cary Cooper, a professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University, said that managers should be realistic. “Britain has some of the longest working hours in the developed world. Employers have created this culture. It is natural for people to have to use work computers for organising their personal life.”

Of course I agree with him. But that is not the point. Social networking is not just about organising ones social life. I certainly do not go to Facebook to arrange to meet my friends in the pub.

Social networking can be about spreading and sharing ideas, solving problems, forming and participating in communities of practice. And to all of you who say I am not being real, I suggest you study how people really use the internet n companies. Most people like to learn, they enjoy learning. Learning is a natural human activity. How sad we are so suspicious of it.

end of todays rant. Time to organise my social life. i am going to the pub.

Technorati Tags: communities of practice, informal learning

I like learning. I am in favour of learning. I am in favour of young people getting the best possible qualifications and opportunities.

But the latest UK government moves to raise the school leaving age to 18 is not helpful. Once more they have confused institutional attendance with learning. Just because a young person is signed up for a regular course does not mean they will learn.

And if they are not attending school or college it does not mean they are not learning.

One of the stated concerns of the government is that the number of jobs for unskilled (their word for not possessing a formal qualification) will fall dramatically in coming years. I am not sure this is right. It is based on the rhetoric of the information society. Is there real evidence this is likely to happen?

But the worst proposal, announced in todays Queen’s speech is the proposal to criminalise those who do not participate. Those who do not stay on in school or work-related training, reports the Guardian, will be served with an “attendance order”, which has been dubbed “the education Asbo”. If they breach this order and refuse to study for a recognised qualification, 16- and 17-year-olds will be guilty of a criminal offence. They will then face a £50 spot fine or a £200 fine in court. But they will not be sent to prison.

So learning or education is something we force people to do at the risk of a large fine (with presumably more sanctions for those unwilling or unable to pay). This provides all the wrong messages.

Instead of forcing young people into a system which is failing so many of them, why not turn the focus on learning opportunities. Instead of a Qualifications Framework why not a Learning Framework. Why not ensure every job, skilled or otherwise, offers rich learning opportunities to everyone and with a choice of learning modes. This would entail a new view of learning - as learning inherent in human activity - rather than being segregated as something which takes place in institutions. And it would entail a new role for work - seeing learning as something as natural to the workplace as working. Ah well - dream on.

Sorry for the lack of entries lately. In the middle of a big re-organisation of Pontydysgu. Many greetings to Peter who has joined us to run the administration. And Dirk is working hard on the launch of our new website. Meanwhile I am hurtling from meeting to meeting.

But there is still time for the odd post here. Some time ago I posted the following question on my Facebook page:

“How can we support informal learning?”

At least I thought I did. What I actually posted was “How can we support informal earning?” What a difference a consonant makes. Well, George Roberts answered the original question:

” I support informal earning through car boot sales and Russian MP3 download sites. CAVEAT: The support of informal earning is illegal, immoral and (I hear) the basis of the economy of Liverpool ;)”

And then I edited the question to my original intent.

Here is a summary of the answers. Thanks to all of you who contributed.

Scott Wilson

Stop hoarding stuff behind passwords and firewalls. Respect informal learning by universally supporting accreditation via APEL.

Jenny Hughes

Who’s ‘we’ ? And what informal learning are we supporting by whom? There’s quite a lot of informal learning I wouldn’t want to support, ditto a lot of informal learners

Cristina Costa

By creating, enhancing, developing and maintaining a learning environment where participants (not students!) are entitled to an opinion, stimulated to develop their own voice and share what they know while LEARNING what they want to learn!

Steve Wheeler

By giving them licence to use more (any type of) social networking

George Roberts

Once it’s supported is it informal? John Cook proposed a continuum: informal (off the radar) via semi-formal to formal. I think “we” can support informal learning by doing formal learning as best we can: open, socially engaged, Freirian, learning-centred.

David Delgado

a) Making it easy to find useful resources for anyone in the organization

b) Making it easy to make connections among people in the organization and sharing their knowledge

c) Encouraging everyone to learn what he needs or likes most in their job

Stan Stanier

I’m with Terry - first we need to identify the what, how and when

Frances Bell

by letting the learner determine the context and content of the learning and then offering support appropriate to that.

Stuart A Yeates

(a) avoidance of over-specified prescriptive assessments

(b) promotion of quality engaging resources

Paul Harrington

I agree with Mr Wassall the first part of the exercise will be to observe how it is happening amongst the ‘digital natives’ ( don’t like the term) - then give them opportunities on our terms to use tech..

Terry Wassall

Good question! First we need to understand how informal learning takes place. Reflecting on and surfacing our own modes of informal learning would be a start, and there are probably many modes and contexts to consider. Then exploit this avoiding formality.