Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

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.

I am not sure that I agree with Jon Dron’s idea of  ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ technologies. But there are many ideas worth thinking about in this presentation. Terry Anderson comments “We had a bit of discussion if holist isn’t just a term for appropriate use of all three pedagogical generations, which we argue for in the paper, thus making the need for a fourth term redundant - just as modern distance education uses multiple generations of communications technologies (print, video, web etc.)”

Neat short intro to Freire’s idea of Critical Pedagogy. I particularly like the definition: “Critical Pedagogy is teachers asking why and students being allowed to ask the same question”.

The European Conference on Educational Research 2011 will take place at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany from 13 – 16 September. The theme of this year’s conference is Urban education and as the conference website notes “Not only are cities burning glasses of societal change and its educational consequences; they also provide remarkable resources to put societal and educational change on the political agenda in order to shape them proactively.”

As in previous years Pontydysgu are providing multi media and ‘amplifying’ support to the conference and if you are not able to attend the conference in person you can follow the event through our streaming of the keynote sessions and internet radio programmes.

Keynotes

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair of The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University She will focus on “The City: Its Return as a Lens into Larger Economic and Technological Histories”
Wed. 14.09., 13:30 – 14:30 Central European Summer Time

read more

Watch this spot for full details of where to go to watch the stream.

Internet Radio

Wednesday 14 September 1430 – 1545 (Central European Summer Time)

Daniel Fischer, Leuphana Univeristy, Luneberg, Germany, Best paper winner 2010,  (Emerging Researchers Conference Award) will talk about consumer education

Harm Kuper from the Free University, Berlin is a member of the local organising committee for ECER 2011

Lejf Moos from the University of Tilburg in Denmark is President of the European Educational Research Association (EERA)

Marit Hoveid from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology is EERA Secretary General Elect

Venka Simovska, also from the University of Tilburg is Convener of a new network: Research on Health Education

Hongmei Ma, from The Chinese University of Hong Kong is an ECER Bursary winner and will give his impressions of the first ECER conference he has attended

Thursday 15 September 1000 – 1030 (Central European Summer Time)

Tjeerd Plomp from the Univerity of Twente was present at the first ever ECER conference. he will talk about how the conference has evolved and grown over the years.

Kathleen Armour from the University of Birmingham in the UK is Convener of a New network: Sports Pedagogy

Melanie Völker is from Waxman publishers who are sponsoring the conference poster prize. She will be talking with us along with the poster prize winners

More guests to be announced

Friday 16 September 1430 – 1500 (Central European Summer Time)

Guests to be announced.

Watch this slot for the address for the radio stream.

We will also update this post as more guests confirm. In the meantime if you are going to the ECER conference and would like to come on the radio programme please email us. And finally if you are at ECER and just want to watch and listen to the  broadcast, we will be situated near the registration desk. Come and meet us.

I have spent some time this morning thinking about the Mozilla Open Badges and assessment project, spurred on by the study group set up by Doug Belshaw to think about the potential of the scheme. And the more I think about it, the more I am convinced of its potential as perhaps one of the most significant developments in the move towards Open Education. First though a brief recap for those of you who have not already heard about the project.

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.

Now some of the issues. I am still concerned of attempts to establish taxonomies, be it those of hierarchy in terms of award structures or those of different forms of ability / competence / skill (pick your own terminology). Such undertakings have bedeviled attempts to introduce new forms of recognition and I worry that those coming more from the educational technology world may not realise the pitfalls of taxonomies and levels.

Secondly is the issue of credibility. There is a two fold danger here. One is that the badges will only be adopted for achievements in areas / subjects / domains presently outside ‘official’ accreditation schemes and thus will be marginalised. There is also a danger that in the desire to gain recognition, badges will be effectively benchmarked against present accreditation programmes (e.g. university modules / degrees) and thus become subject to all the existing restrictions of such accreditation.

And thirdly, as the project roils towards a full release, there may be pressures for restricting badge issuers to existing accreditation bodies, and concentrating on the technological infrastructure, rather than rethinking practices in assessment.

Lets look at some of the characteristics of any assessment system:

Having spent much time in Germany working as a researcher around vocational educatio0n and training I am a big fan of apprenticeships. True, the German dual system of apprenticeships has its weaknesses, but in general if offers a respected and high quality training to over half the age cohort. As Wikipedia explains,  there are some 342 recognized trades (Ausbildungsberufe) where an apprenticeship can be completed. They include for example doctor’s assistant, banker, dispensing optician, plumber or oven builder. The dual system means that apprentices spend about 50-70% of their time in companies and the rest in formal education. Depending on the profession, they may work for three to four days a week in the company and then spend one or two days at a vocational school (Berufsschule). This is usually the case for trade and craftspeople. For other professions, usually which require more theoretical learning, the working and school times take place blockwise e.g. in a 12–18 weeks interval.

I have also long bemoaned the poor apprenticeship system in the UK, which was largely abolished with the demise of the Training Boards in the 1970s. Many young people are forced into inappropriate university courses which provide poor training for their career and result in large personal debts. So in theory I should be happy with today’s House of Commons library research, as reported in the Guardian newspaper, which shows that the coalition exceeded its target of creating 203,200 apprenticeships for people over 19 in the 2010-11 financial year, creating 257,000 new apprentices. And I am sure that the headline will be seized on by apprenticeship advocates in Germany and other parts of the world as welcome news that the UK has indeed at last re-established a reputable apprenticeship training system.

Sadly this is not so. The research shows that the biggest increases in apprenticeships are in health and social care and retail; indeed one of the most dramatic increases was in the “cleaning and support service industry”, where 1,930 apprentices were created in the academic year 2010-11, compared with 360 in the previous academic year. In other words the majority of the apprenticeships have been created in low skills service industries.

One of the major problems for comparative researchers is how apprenticeship is defined in the UK. Apprentices are defined as paid employees who gain practical skills in the workplace as well as receiving training outside work. In other words any programme which provides external training for employees as well as some form of practical skills training can be counted as an apprentice and therefore employers are able to draw down subsidies for the training. This goes some way towards explaining why the largest increases were for ‘apprentices’ aged over 25 where numbers nearly quadrupled, from 36,300 to 121,100. And perhaps the most telling figure is in the average length of the so called apprenticeships. In Germany most apprenticeships take three years to complete. But in the UK, apprenticeships lasting longer than a year rose by under 2% while those lasting less than a year increased by over 30% on 2009-10.Overall, the proportion of apprenticeships lasting longer than a year dropped from 47% to 41%. Indeed many appear to have been shorter than 12 weeks!

Whilst any increase in work based training is welcome, the new programmes being introduced in the UK are a parody of the idea of apprenticeship. And sadly the credibility of apprenticeship training as a whole is likely to be reduced, both in the eyes of young people and from the viewpoint of employers.

Its my first day back in the office after three weeks of meetings, conference summer schools and travel. There is a lot to catch up on. First a rather belated review of the Personal Learning Environments 2011 conference in Southampton, UK.

#PLE_SOU (for some reason we have adopted a hash tag convention of following airport codes!) had much to live up to. The first PLE conference in 2010 in Barcelona had created a great buzz around it. In part this may have been the excitement of a conference dedicated to PLEs, in part the wonderful people it attracted and also the great venue in Barcelona. It was also because last year we had spent considerable effort in moving away from the traditional twenty minute paper presentation, followed by five or ten minutes of discussion, to facilitating more open and interactive formats, adapting more unconferencing type approaches to exchanging ideas.

We adopted the same approach in Southampton. Not everyone is happy with such an approach and it requires considerable effort on the part of session facilitators. But just as in Barcelona, we wanted to merge the informal and formal sides of the conference and to develop an ongoing dialogue between participants.At the same time with three or four simultaneous sessions we wished to provide people with choices of different formats and with opportunities for unconferencing break out sessions if the wished. And on the whole I think it worked well.

This year too, we put considerable effort into ensuring  we had a robust technical infrastructure capable of supporting everyone being logged on with at least two devices simultaneously and providing a rolling display of tweets from the conference. We also provided a live stream from one of the four conference spaces, which attracted a surprising number of participants. Next year we will look at ways to better integrate those following the conference at a dostance.

Lisa, Su and Hugh, assisted by David Delgado have put considerable effort into the curation of the conference, with the conference web site providing access to photos, slides and videos and to a full archive of conference papers.

Now on to  the contents (based on the sessions I attended). We still have no agreement on a definition of PLEs. I am not sure this is important. There seems to be a broad consensus about PLEs as an approach to teaching and learning and within that there is plenty of room for different developments and initiatives, be it m,ore theoretical pedagogic research, surveys and empirical studies, innovation in practice or technological development. Different approaches could include the development of Personal Learni9ng Environments, institutional support for PLE development (more on that in a moment), MOOCs or support for work based learning. Having said that there was a general recognition that the adaption of a PLE approach is challenging existing institutional practices and for example present practices around assessment are a barrier to PLE implementation.

There was also considerable concern that not all learners are confident or capable of developing and managing their own PLEs. In part this concern was based on a series of different studies looking at how learners are using new technologies and particularly social software and social networking applications. These studies are valuable and it would be good if there could be some kind of sharing space for such work.

Concerns over the confidence of learners in using technology are largely behind the move towards developing ‘institutional PLEs’. There is also a move by schools to adopt such systems both because of concerns for privacy and data security with commercial applications and services and to allow access to social networking technologies for those under 13 years old.

Although most research and development presented at the conference was orientated towards higher education there appears to be increasing interest in PLEs not only from the school sector but also for learning at work and in the c0mmunity.

Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of the discussions was that we were talking about actual PLE implementations, rather than the more speculative research  and planning in Barcelona. PLEs are no longer a dream, but are increasingly being adopted for learning.

It is conference season. Today marks the start of the PLE2011 conference in London. Together with Andrew Ravenscroft, Dirk Stieglitz and David Blagborough, I am presenting a paper with the snappy name ‘‘Jam Hot!’ Personalised radio ciphers through augmented social media for the transformational learning of disadvantaged young people.’

Although the paper is very much a work in progress, there are a series of ideas here which I find interesting and will return to on this blog in the future. In the meantime any feedback very welcome.

‘Jam Hot!’ Personalised radio ciphers through augmented social media for the transformational learning of d…

Ten wpis jest zainspirowany dzisiejszą dyskusją na temat microlearningu w ramach kursu #opco11 na Twitter.

Temat tak zwanego microlearningu (czyli “mikro-nauka”) i microcontentu (czyli “mikro-treści”) poruszany jest w głównie w odniesieniu do Web 2.0 i mobile learning.  Nowe formy komunikacji, nauki i pracy, które są w dużej części wynikiem stosowania nowych technologi w codziennym życiu, sprzyja powstawaniu takich miniaturowych form nauki i przekazywania treści.

Szczególnie narzędzia Web 2.0 pozwalają potencjanie każdemu użytkownikowi na tworzenie takich mikro-treści, czyli małych porcji, które można skonsumować niezależnie od pierwotnego kontekstu, w którym te treści powstały (zastrzeżenie: oczywiście na poziomie zależnym od dostępu do technologii i kompetencji niezbędnych do stosowania ich). Takie tworzenie własnych treści w małych porcjach (które żartobliwie można by nazwać  “przekąską na wynos”, ale tylko żartobliwie, bo nie chodzi tu tylko o konsumpcję, ale też produkcję treści) może nabrać różnych form, np. mikro-treścią może być wpis na blogu, komentarz do tego wpisu, tweet (z linkiem do dalszej lektury) na Twitterze, albo krótki film do nauki wsadzony na YouTube.

Mikro-treści są więc w pewnejj części treściami generowanymi przez użytkowników, czyli tzw. “user-generated content”. Ale nie zawsze – są też placówki edukacyjne i firmy, które zajmują sie profesjonalnym tworzeniem micro-treści, np. W ramach szkoleń pracowników albo do celów marketingowych. Mikro-treści i mikro-nauka w połaczeniu z Web 2.0 tworzą kulturę “zrób to sam”,  której każdy może być autorem treści przeznaczonych do nauki i innych celów.

Jakiś czas temu ukazała się na ten temat moja publikacja, w której przedstawiłam koncept microlearningu jako strategię profesjonalnego rozwoju w 21 wieku. Moim zdaniem microlearing umożliwia produktywne wykorzystanie czasu i uczenie się w przerwach, np. podczas podrózy do pracy, w poczekalni u lekaża, w domu po pracy.

Oczywiście jest to tylko dodatkowa forma nauki, która nie powinna powstrzymywać ludzi od przeczytania książki albo brania udziału w dłuższym szkoleniu. Microlearning może byc stosowany sam w sobie, np. kursu w formie małych porcji tekstu lub ćwiczeń na smarfona albo jako uzupełniający element, np. dodatkowe nagrania audio do pogłebienia wcześniej poznanych tematów na iPoda albo webinar wprowadzający w temat przed szkoleniem na żywo. Możliwość kombinacji i formatów technicznych jest tu bardzo duża.

Charakterystyczna cechą mikro-treści jest to, że są one oczywiście krótkie, ale też luźno ze sobą powiązane, tzw. każda porcja może istnieć sama w sobie, musi mieć sens sama w sobie, czyli być koherentną jednostką. W przeciwieństwie do typowych kursów, które budowane są hierarchicznie (najpierw musimy nauczyć się czegoś, aby móc przejść do nastęnego poziomu), mikrolearning polega na tym, że każda mikrotreść może być dowolnie używana przez uczącego się. Z dydaktycznego punktu widzenia interesujące jest to, jak planować krótkie mikro-aktywności wokół takich mikro-treści, np. kolaboratywne pisanie krótkich tekstów (np. streszczeń, raportów) albo komentowanie krótkich nagrań audio/video (np. feedback, własna opinia, ocena).

Na koniec polecam kilka pozycji z literatury angielsko- i niemieckojęzycznej (w kolejnosci alfabetycznej):

• Buchem, Ilona/Hamelmann, Henrike. (2010). Microlearning: a strategy for ongoing professional development. eLearning Papers, 21, September 2010
• Hug, Theo (2007). Didactics of Microlearning: Concepts, Discourses and Examples. Waxmann.
• Kaufmann, Catherine (2006). Microlearing and (Micro)Didaktik. Micromedia eLearning 20 Gaining the Big Picture Proceedings of Microlearning Conference 2006 (2006)
• Lindner, Martin (2006). On Macromedia and Microlearning. ALT-C 2006 Research Paper.

This morning I delivered a keynote speech (or more like a keynote storytelling session) at the European Distance Education Network (EDEN) conference in Dublin. And a lot of fun it was too (particularly chair Sally Reynolds desperate attempts to turn off her mobile phone which went off half way through my talk). The keynote was followed by a panel session with fellow speakers Paul Kim from Stanford University and Clare Dillon from Microsoft, along with Jim device and Alfredo Soeiro and chaired by Gilly Salmon.

Gilly ran the panel session as an unconferencing session with ample opportunities for participation by conference delegates.

The emergent themes shaping the discussion (and indeed the overall conference) were interesting. Also what was not discussed if of some interest. VLEs seem not longer an issue, with an acceptance that learners will appropriate all kinds of technologies for learning. And indeed there was little discussion about technologies themselves. However, emergent themes focused on the soci0-technical uses of technology for learning, its impact on education systems and institutions and indeed the future of education, particularly universities. There were a number of sessions looking at Open education and Open Education Resources, but with a lack of clarity of what these terms mean. Quality is seen as a major issue, especially in terms of the perceived variable quality of online programmes. However approaches to this issue vary. Most delegates seemed to favour some kind of quality benchmarking or approval, although there seemed little idea of how this might work. Equally the issue of accreditation of learning was a major issue but with little consensus on how this should be organised, particularly with relation to ‘open education’.

And whilst there seemed general agreement of the need to extend learning, particularly to those presently without access to formal education or training, there were considerable differences on how this might be achieved and the role of the private sector in such provision.

In some ways the discussions may be seen as a response to the present economic crisis. But in another wayit may refelct the mainstreaming of technology enhanced learning. Maybe we will soon be able to get rid of the e from e-learning.