But I do agree with the spirit of this report from the Guardian newspaper.

“Children of all ages should study philosophy in school to develop their critical thinking skills, education experts said today….

The book Philosophy in Schools, edited by Dr Michael Hand of the Institute of Education and Dr Carrie Winstanley of Roehampton University, puts forward several arguments for including philosophy in the school curriculum.

“Critical thinkers are people who reason well, and who judge and act on the basis of their reasoning,” Hand says.

“To become critical thinkers, children must learn what constitutes good reasoning and why it’s important - and these are philosophical matters.

“Exposure to philosophy should be part of the basic educational entitlement of all children.”

In philosophy, the quality of arguments and the meanings of words are under constant scrutiny.

Winstanley said teachers could use popular books to initiate philosophical discussions. For example, Where the Wild Things Are could lead into debates on the existence of monsters, and why the main character’s mother sends him to his room without supper.

Winstanley said: “Better than any other subject, philosophy teaches children how to assess reasons, defend positions, define terms, evaluate sources of information and judge the value of arguments and evidence.”

Philosophy also allows younger children to engage in discussion and argument even before they know very much.”

Some funny ideas in the artcile. Children know a lot - even whan they are young. But yes, learninga bout ideas would be a usful start to education!

“Well here I am again in Bremen, squatting on Graham’s blog. He’s abandoned me on a key board while he has gone out for a pizza and, much as I dislike blogging, I dislike pizza even more – always reminds me of a picture of food on a plate.

This is the second time this week I have swapped identities with Graham. I think. On Thursday evening he was invited to a fashion show and disco. Fortunately for all those of you have seen him dance or noticed his taste in clothes, this all took place in Second Life. So there we were, sitting in a bar, laptop, fags and beer at the ready and Graham hands over the keyboard on the grounds that I’m better at talking rubbish and faster at typing drivel than he is.

Now whose identity am I taking over? And come to think of it, who am I? His 2L ID is Graham Lightfoot (in his dreams), a superhero lookalike who for the occasion was dressed in gimpy black leathers with definite shoulder pads (the embarrassment of it!). So I played at being Jenny Hughes being Graham Attwell being Graham Lightfoot for a while then I thought it would be more fun being my own SL identity being Graham Lightfoot being the first life Graham Attwell who was, at that moment, Jenny Hughes. Keep up. I also have another first life identity (for particular writing purposes) and she has a second life ID as well. And I am a virtual student who I teach and she is someone else in SL. Maybe I should have invited them all along, just to see what dialogue my fingers wrote.

Do I have an identity crisis? Well I guess it depends on which one of me you are asking.

So all this gets us into late-night, beer-fuelled conversations about identities - justified as ‘research’ for a forthcoming project on ‘Identities’. Now my job at Pontydysgu is to generate ideas on demand and turn up occasionally for which I get paid in beer. It’s a good system, 1 idea = 1 beer, or, if pushed, 1000 words = 1 beer. (I’m thinking about having a word with my union rep to see if I can get on to a fixed rate of 1 hour = 1 beer.) My starting point when Graham says I want 2 ideas by tomorrow is always to grope around my brain to see if I can recycle anything still alive in there. I think it’s called re-purposing. Unfortunately my brain is a bit like my handbag – filled with all sorts of junk I carry around just in case it comes in useful. And there, like the toffee in the bottom of my handbag-brain, I unearthed a rather squashed memory about Erving Goffman’s “dramaturgical approach”. It took me a while to get pick the fluff off – it was, after all, 1959 when he wrote his blockbuster “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’ and I had read it as a student back in the 60’s.

(Why should novelists have blockbusters and academics have to make do with Seminal Works, I ask??)

One of the things I like about the dramaturgical approach is that it looks at context rather than behaviour. I like the Wikipaedia explanation

“In this sense, dramaturgy is a process which is determined by consensus between individuals. Because of this dependence on consensus to define social situations, the perspective argues that there is no concrete meaning to any interaction that could not be redefined.”

The core of Goffman’s thinking was that a person’s identity is not a stable and independent psychological entity; it is constantly remade as the person interacts with others.

Sweet. And seems to me as good a starting point for looking at identities as any.

Now a great many of you sociologist-types will be very familiar with all his stuff, given that Goffman was one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century, but for the rest of you and Graham, here are some sound bites.

Goffman had lots of ‘bits’ in his theory, some bits are more applicable to identities issues than others.

He makes heavy use of metaphors and looks at communication and social interaction as if it was a theatrical performance. He argues that there are 7 elements to a performance. So, in no particular order:

The front or ‘the mask’ is a standardized, generalizable and transferable way for the performer to control the manner in which the audience perceives him. I would say this could be an avatar, a login name or whatever. Just go to the chat rooms to look at some of the more off the wall names, especially when you just know that Hunkybeast and Lionking are 5 foot nothing, scrawny little men who wear string vests.

Mystification refers to the concealment of certain information from the audience and why this is done. So Hunkybeast is often a bit economical with the truth about his wife and 5 kids.

Dramatic realization is the selection of aspects of the performer that he wants the audience to know. For instance, when projects, as a matter of course, set up communication platforms on their web sites I remember being outraged that they even suggested I put up a photograph or told people who my friends were. Even now, I tend to select out more aspects of myself than maybe Graham. Though of course it depends on the context and certainly changes with my identities - on Facebook I’m happy to fill in every quiz going to find out and share with the world ‘What sort of Drunk Am I?’.

Idealization. A performance often presents an idealized view of the situation to avoid confusion (misrepresentation) and strengthen other elements. So the way I write this blog is different from the way I write an academic paper, partly because the style reaffirms it is a blog but also suggests that there is actually a human being behind the performance who is ….(I was going to say warm, funny, witty, interesting, gorgeous but Graham said …..) a small grumpy troll.

Maintenance of expressive control is about the extent to which people stay in character. I am truly ace at this. I have complete on-line alter ego who not only has a complete identity but he or she (giving nothing away) also has an identity in SL, makes spelling mistakes and typos I don’t make, uses a different vocabulary and different sentence construction and different abbreviations (yeah, I was a linguist in a previous life. That’s without the detail of their ‘life’.

Finally, the needs to be a level of belief by those playing the part in the parts they are playing. This may be high or low, total or partial, cynical or authentic etc. I sometimes have a sneaky suspicion that Graham believes he really is a broad shouldered super-hero lookalike in first life as well as second.

Please, all you purists, don’t write and tell me that this is not at all what Goffman meant. I am only borrowing some ideas with a view to a bit of ‘re-purposing.’ There are lots more bits I think are useful in Goffman’s ideas but this blog entry is getting way too long and I’m getting hungry.

In particular I’d like to have look at what he said about ‘stages’ – back stage, front stage and off-stage, about ‘roles’ and about ‘secrets’ and how this connects with stuff I am playing with on learning ‘narrative’ (watch this space). At the moment I’m not sure if I can do anything useful with these ideas but I’d love to know whether anyone else sees any potential in them in providing a framework for exploring ‘identities’.

PS I’ve just counted Goffman’s elements and I’ve only talked about 6 because I can’t remember the seventh. Anyone who can fill the blank?”

“I write this from a teacher’s perspective. I may write the story from a learner’s perspective later. It is a response to Graham’s piece of Nov 9th about the death of VLE’s.

This is a heresy in some circles – repositories of learning materials are not what the world needs. The idea that a teacher needs a mound of other people’s worksheets or powerpointlesses or yet –SCORM/IMS Learning Design structured learning objects is a figment of the imagination of deranged computer scientists and people who need tidy desks to remember where they put things.

I will say that having good access to some neat stuff (like a well drawn diagram of  Fleming’s Left Hand Rule which I found in seconds on Wikipedia) and sharing that knowledge with others is incredibly useful.

What was true in 1994 – when I first wrote a successful grant proposal for social media in education – is true now. Sharing and borrowing is what we need to facilitate. Sharing and borrowing are social actions. They involve reciprocity and interaction between the people who share and borrow. It comes with knowledge that the people are the source and people are the receivers of this stuff and that is quite a different mindset to the notion of a repository. They are verbs associated with communities. They come with conversations.

It is increasingly easy to find stuff and publish stuff in ways they can be found. The repository is the internet and search engines are pretty dam powerful. They both become much more powerful when people are trading ideas around what is there.

My first attempt at a “virtual learning platform” was an open access room in my University that was open ‘til late. It had 12 networked MacPlus with some networked hard drives (G. Sidhu is the unsung hero of modern computing for developing AppleTalk) with the best peripherals and software tools I could afford (Scanners etc). People met, people talked, people traded, people created together. My second attempt added FirstClass to this – which coupled with putting 56 computers into the schools where my pre-service trainee teachers were learning to teach. I learned from this.

One thing I learned is that teaching and sharing on line is not straight-forward. People who were starting using the internet for learning just then where doing things like putting up some text and the telling students to “discuss and respond” in some associated forum. The kid who was going to do well usually wrote a convincing response and the best the rest could do would be to say “me-too” or “flame”. Instruction to students needed to be structured in ways that allowed multiple responses and required students to think about how they would involve others in their learning. It needed to be like the open access room where there was borrowing, sharing and mutual support. I have some  historic advice on this.

The online environment we started to build as a European Framework 4 Telematics project REM was about a multi-media learning network (we were not building platforms or repositories- we were building tools for a learning network – a different mind-set). It had means to share and discuss resources and to build collaborative learning in a virtual resource rich environment. As with all too many projects the files now rest on an old hard disk with files dated December 2000 – the end of funding.

There was a tension in the development I am only just fully coming to understand. There was some feeling amongst the project workers that there was “a” workflow through which we would drive people. We adopted a model from a paper by Lehrer et  et al . This was constructivist in its intent – however I do not think that the authors intended it to be as hard wired as a workflow as our designs might have made it.  I think design and learning are not one-way flows or on a single track. Human activity is capable of managing multiple tracks – and prefers it that way – that is to say learning is managed by the learner – learning management is not imposed or assumed by the system. As an aside, my colleagues who promoted this system initially (with my full agreement) went on to be leading proponents of IMS Learning Design. I think at a micro level it is clearly the job of a tutor to direct attention to what is salient and more importantly provide formative feedback to students on their learning. I am far from convinced that there is a set of recipes, templates or algorithms that are the formula for teaching and learning success. I appreciate that has been a holy grail for learning technology. My 36 year career in learning technology has been littered with such visions from   Skinner  onwards. I think humans are much too good at learning to be constrained by such tracks.  I even proposed an   educational modeling language  based on conversations and meaning making (as per  Nonaka) myself.

I   do think that some of the ideas expressed about the teaching of creativity in design by  Richard Kimbell at London Goldsmiths – who proposes phases like having ideas, developing ides and testing ideas without suggesting that students might not be doing all three in some sense at any time – although design will tend to go in a general direction if it is to be completed.

But getting back to the main thread of thought. In our second phase of development of this learning network tools we engaged with a BIG international bank. What was learned from talking to their training management was that they had  profound understanding of learning in their company, that development of staff was multi-dimensional: company process knowledge; knowledge of the industry’s facts and concepts (legal frameworks, economics etc) ; generic knowledge (IT skills) and interpersonal skills and so on. Using a standardised controlled vocabulary to describe their resources or most of the wrappings of systems like SCORM did not begin to address the richness of training they needed to deliver. However they were very systematic in profiling employees, their employees career trajectories, and equally profiling the needs and skills that the company required to function as a business. They recognized they needed systems of mentoring, instruction, community building, reward-giving, need-identification, ambition fulfilling . They had their own dynamic mappings of conversations, resources and learning pathways. The pathways were never straight.

Here is a simple case example. An employee was newly charged with writing a quarterly report that demanded skills in spreadsheets and charts he had not previously had. Normal processes would have had them identify and external course provider and sent the employee out for a day at some high-cost and loss of his labour for that day. A modern trend might have been the provision of one of the many dull online courses there are in the subject. However the company had tagged or profiled one of its employees with “Excel expert” and “mentoring” attributes. The company demonstrated that having someone show you the ropes to get going and being there to help when you get stuck is quite and efficient way of learning to use software – and in the process two people were having their career developed and a community of practice was being augmented.

When Graham Attwell writes about social media tools connected together to make learning are   better than VLEs  we should think about that social process of learning and teaching. Sure we can probably do them better with loosely coupled tools but I can still make cock-ups. The way we plumb things together is significant and needs to map onto the activity system or be part of the transformation of an activity system. That is a new skill – however we are fortunate in that the tool-bag is fairly bulging with opportunity and we can add, remove, augment or find scope for new invention. We can build many tailored systems for sharing and reciprocity that are true to the context in which they work. One size, one platform, one standard does not fit all.

Wikipedia  provides a definition of an unconference: “An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by a single organizer, or small group of organizers, in advance.“

So my co-facilitator, Brian Kelly (I have ‘borrowed some of his report for this blog entry) and I had to prepare for an event driven by the participants and not by ourselves. The approach we took was to prepare for a number of ways of stimulating discussion, if this was needed. However on the day it turned out that this was not needed as two interesting discussions took place in our two sessions: one on transliteracy and one on the ethical aspects of use of social networks.

Professor Sue Thomas of De Montford University introduced the ‘transliteracy’ topic. Again looking at Wikipedia I find the definition of Transliteracy given as “The ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.“. (This has been taken from the PART (Production and Research in Transliteracy) Group Web site).

Whilst we were downstairs having an ongoing and evolving discussion around these issues, upstairs  a series of round table discussions (once more participant driven) were being held. Participants in the JISC Emerge community are preparing a series of bids for project under the JISCX Users and Innovation programme.  Most of these nascent projects focus on the use of Web 2.0 technologies for learning - including simulations, games and tagging.

But it seemed to me that many of the issues we were discussing - social practices in the use of technologies, skills and competencies required by users - both learners and teachers, ethical issues and  issues of ownership and control - are the real issues which  underpin the use of Web 2.0 and social  software.

Here is a list of key words I jotted down during the discussion:

• Ethics
  
  privacy
  
  permissions
  
  acceptable use
  
  accessibility
  
  socialbility
  
  usability

Cool apps are great - but it is the social environment and practices which will define their use and their usefulness in practice. So it may be that if we want to start developing some great (social) learning applications we need to think through all these issues at the same time.

I got an email from my mate Jenny in Pontypridd.

“Thought you might like to know what the e-generation (of about Owen’s age funnily enough!!) call the people of your generation  (puddings) who they grudgingly accept as nearly ICT literate (and therefore worth talking to occasionally) and are geeky about widgets and gizmos and boys toys (could even have been talking about you) (well, ok was actually talking about you)….

= Blackberry and Apple crumblies.

You’ve been called a lot of things in your time, thought this was one of the better ones - maybe you should admit to it in your blog at some point - or use it elsewhere.

I, on the other hand, don’t qualify. I am apparently an Apple tart - as is everyone with a white Barbie Mac, irrespective of gender.

Jen

PS There are more ….

    Dull but posey or posh bastards with the latest go faster gadgets they don’t understand are Toff E-puddings.

    Those wot pontificate at length about computers,  especially those avant garde types who shout from the rooftops about what the technology of the future is etc are I-screamers.

  Â

Gooseberries (as in gooseberry fool) are those that have cheap tacky versions of Blackberries and think they are the real thing. By extension, anyone who has an MP3 player not an i-pod)

  Â

A chocolate is someone who lives on his phone but has never progressed past texting and phone games and thinks technology stops there. Its also someone who is obsessed with updating to the latest model. (chocolate orange - keep up)

  Â

The also-rans, wedded to Windows, are just Cakes. (PC’s-a-cake if you really want to know!!)

  Â

Noisy anti-apple Windows champions, on the other hand, are ‘Eckles (cakes)

So I ’spose you are a blackberry and apple crumbly with a dollop of i-scream who hangs around with a past-the-sell-by-date apple tart and hates cakes.