Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

I am extremely busy today but time for a quick catch up on the Personal Learning Environments Conference 2011, being held from July 11- 13 in Southampton UK.

Last years conference in Barcelona attracted nearly 90 submissions, far in excess of what we expected. This year we had less, with 65 papers, symposia and workshops. I don’t think the lesser number was due to reduced interest, but rather that in the present economic climate, many researchers are finding it hard to gain funding for conferences (I will write a further blog on how we can deal with this). I suspect also that beautiful though Southampton may be, it does not match Barcelona in terms of conference pulling power! We have just finished the review procedure with all the attendant difficulties of establishing shared criteria and quality standards for reviews and persuading overworked colleagues tos pare the time for an unpaid for activity.

Out of the 65 submissions we have rejected two for not meeting the submission guidelines. A further four are ‘borderline’ and we are further reviewing those proposals. Happily the rest are considered good enough fro acceptance.

The good news – in general the standard of submissions is much higher this year than last year. I suspect there are two main reasons for this – firstly an improved common understanding in our communities around the idea of Personal Learning Environments. Last year we had problems in that in many proposals it was hard to relate the focus of the paper to the idea of PLEs – this year that relationship is much clearer. The second reason is that we extended the length of abstracts this year and that seems to have improved the quality.

But I still get the feeling that a number of submissions do not do justice to the ideas and research on which they are based. I do not find it easy writing proposal abstracts and wonder if there is some mileage in firstly a little collective thinking in what we are looking for in a proposal and how we can convey that to potential contributors and secondly a more inclusive and supporting procedure to help those – especially ‘emerging’ researchers in writing quality proposals. Any ideas welcome.

The PLE2011 conference being held in Southampton from 11-13 July has announced its (un) keynote speakers – Cristina Costa, Scott Wilson, Riina Vuorikari and Les Carr.

According to the conference web site they will provide key insights and understanding of what makes a PLE, from personal experience, through individual analysis and with thoughtful speculations on the future directions of this important field. “Each of our four keynotes will offer a slightly different perspective on Personal Learning Environments and each guarantees to ensure that their sessions attain the high level of interactions and audience engagement which was established with the first conference in Barcelona.”

The organisers have announced an extension until April 10 for submissions to the PLE2011 conference taking place at the University of Southampton. UK, from July 11th to 13th 2011. The PLE Conference is intended to produce a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experience and research around the development and implementation of PLEs – including the design of environments and the sociological and educational issues that they raise.  Full details from the conference website.

Last year Pontydysgu helped organise the first Perosnal Learning environment’s Conference, PLE2010, held in Barcelona. And, to our delight, it was a huge sucess, as much for teh open format and exchanget of ideas as the subject, I suspect.

And although, we had envisaged the conference being a one off, we have been encouraged by the feedback to organise a second conference this year. Our good friends Hugh Davis, Lisa Harris and Su White at the University of Southampton in the UK have kindly offered to host the conference. And here is the call for contributions. As last year, we particularly welcome interactive and participative formats for sessions. The conference web site can be accessed here.

Call for Papers: The PLE Conference 2011

Following the highly successful inaugural event in Barcelona (#PLE_BCN), the next PLE Conference will be held at the University of Southampton, UK (#PLE_SOU) from July 11th  to 13th 2011, and will have a lively social  programme as well as a highly interactive and innovative technical programme.

The Personal Learning Environment (PLE) Conference is intended to produce a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experience and research around the development and implementation of PLEs – including the design of environments and the sociological and educational issues that they raise. Whilst the conference includes a traditional research paper strand, we also encourage proposals for sessions in different formats including workshops, posters, debates, cafe sessions and demonstrations aiming to sustain the dynamic and interactive discussion environment established by the opening event in Barcelona in 2010.

A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) includes the tools, communities, and services that constitute individual educational platforms learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals. This represents a shift away from the traditional model of learning, and towards a model where students draw connections from a growing matrix of online and offline resources that they select and organise. To gain something of the flavour of last year¹s conference search for #PLE_BCN and see http://pleconference.citilab.eu/

CALL FOR PAPERS

Deadline Saturday 26th March

The conference organisers welcome 500-800 word abstracts for full or short research papers. Submissions for other types of presentation, such as workshops, symposia, demonstrations and installations are also encouraged. These can be submitted electronically via ConfTool http://pleconf.cs.uni-paderborn.de/ . The full guidelines for submissions can be downloaded here.

Conference themes

Conference themes include (but are not limited to):

• Theories and frameworks for Personal Learning Environments
• Technologies and software for developing Personal Learning Environments
• PLEs in Practice (case studies, approaches to using PLEs)
• Educational institutions, change and PLEs
• Pedagogical approaches to managing personal learning
• The development and management of Personal Learning Networks
• Mobile PLEs and augmented reality
• Supporting informal and contextual learning
• Using PLEs in organisations
• Using PLEs for Work Based Learning
• Mash-up PLEs
• Presentation formats
• Future visions:  Quo vadis PLE?

The PLE conference is especially looking for originality and relevancy of ideas and for creative proposals, in both form and content. Formats for publication and communication of research are two different things! Independently of the publication format you decide to contribute, full research paper, workshop etc., the organising committee encourages interactive and creative ways of communicating research.

Hence, we invite you to submit your contribution in the publication format you prefer and select your preference regarding the type of presentation  you wish to make (e.g.: round table discussion, bring your own laptop, cafe session, etc.) in the submission form. Once the review of papers is concluded, presentations will be organised by topics and session chairs will start liaising with participants regarding the organisation of their session. Our goal is to create spaces for meaningful discussions. In short, the purpose is to create opportunities for delegates to interact with each other and achieve real communication. We aim to promote dialogue and interactivity throughout the conference.

We welcome submissions and ideas for videos, photo collages, podcasts,  cartoons, posters – or any other kind of artifacts you can think of. In celebration of User Generated Content we will have a Mediacast Contest during the PLE Conference 2011 with awards for the best three mediacast productions on Personal Learning Environments.

A separate call for pechakucha sessions will be released shortly.

Review Process

All proposals will be subject to a peer review process and all proposals accepted will be published electronically with an ISSN number. In addition to the proceedings, we intend to publish selected conference papers in special editions of the journals that support the conference.
Please note that all submissions should be licensed under a Creative Commons licence.

Each registered participant may submit one full or short paper contribution to the conference, although further proposals in different formats are welcome.

Deadlines

The deadline for proposals is March 26th, 2011.
You will be notified if your submission has been accepted by April 30th.
For those submitting proceedings papers, the deadline for the receipt of the full paper is May 28th.

Final Submission Information

Full Papers
If your abstract is accepted, the full paper should be between 3000 and 5000 words. words (including references, tables and figures).

Short Papers/ Extended Abstracts
The short paper proposals are especially designed to encourage the presentation of work in progress. Short papers should be between 1500 words and 2500 words.

Workshops, Posters, Symposia, Demonstration, Installations, BringYourOwnLaptop sessions and other Formats.
Please submit your proposal indicating that you intend to make a contribution in one of these alternative formats.

I(n the concluding session of the PLE conference last year in Barcelona I made a rash promise. We would go through all the papers submitted to the conference, I said, and for those authors that wished, we would seek to publish the papers in a series of special editions of journal. We had no shortage of journals, with four editions offering us space. then the problems started. it is much, much more work than I had anticipated to select appropriate papers for journals with differing foci, to organise peer reviews, to contact authors and get them to undertake the revisions requested and to finally edit and format the different contributions.

I still am not sure how I feel about the academic publishing industry (for that is what it is). I am much happier with publishing in online and open journals. But I wonder if the traditional journal format best serves knowledge development. However I recognise the i9mportasnce for individual researchers in publishing their work. And although laborious, most of the reviews we received were thoughtful and helpful, although there still remain widespread discrepancies over perceptions of academic quality.

Anyway, here is the first of our edited journals, published by the online and open journal, the Digital Education Review (the second will be in International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments – to be published this Spring.

The papers in this edition are all from authors working in Spain and the journal was edited by Ricardo Torres and myself

Strategy approach for eLearning 2.0 deployment in Universities

Oskar Casquero, Javier Portillo, Ramón Ovelar, Jesús Romo, Manuel Benito



I am ultra impressed by the idea behind the Declare-It web app. The site says

Declare-It is a tool that assists you in creating, tracking and being held accountable to your goals. For every declaration you make, Declare-It requires you to add supporters. Supporters are notified of your declaration and receive progress reports along your journey. If you start to fall off track, your supporters are sent an ALERT message. They can send you comments and even add incentives to help you stay motivated.

Sadly, Declare-It is a commercial site. Although it allows a ten day free trial, it then costs $9.99 per month. And I don’t honestly see enough people being prepared to pay that money for the site to gain critical mass. But the idea is simple enough and could easily be adopted or extended to other web tools.

Essentially all it is saying is that we set our own learning goals and targets and use our Personal Learning Networks for support. Then rather than just selecting friends to monitor our progress and receive alerts when we slip behind, as in the Declare-It app, we could select friends from our Personal Learning Network to support our learning and receive alerts when we achieve something or need collaboration.

Of course many of this will do that already using all kinds of different tools. My learning is work based, and most of this work is undertaken in collaboration with others – using email, forums or very often skype. Having said that I have  never really got on with any of the myriad task setting (lists) and tracking tools and astikll  tend to write my lists on the back of envelopes.

But rather than a separate web site like Declare-IT (which admittedly does have some Twitter and Facebook integration), I need some way of integrating Declare-It type functionality with my everyday workflow. A WordPress plug-in could be wonderful, particularly for project work.

The first blog of the new year looks at what I see as something of a contradiction for those of us wanting to change and hopefully improve education. Lets look at two trends from 2010.

In terms of the use of technology for teaching and learning we saw limited technical innovation. OK, the UK saw an increasing trend towards providing Virtual Learning environments (mainly Moodle) in primary schools. Applications like Google docs and Dropbox allowed enhanced facilities for collaborative work and file sharing. However neither of these was designed specifically for educational use. Indeed the main technical trend may have been on the one hand the increased use of social software and cloud computing apps for learning and on the other hand a movement away from free social software towards various premium business models. Of course mobile devices are fast evolving and are making an increasing impact on teaching and learning.

But probably the main innovation was in terms of pedagogy and in wider approaches to ideas around learning. and here the major development is around open learning. Of course we do not have a precise or agreed definition of what open education or open learning means. But the movement around Open Educational Resources appears to be becoming a part of the mainstream development in the provision of resources for tecahing and learning, despite significant barriers still to be overcome.  And there is increasing open and free tecahing provision be it through online ‘buddy’ systems, say for language learning, various free courses available through online VLEs and the proliferation of programmes offered as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) using a variety of both educational and social software. Whilst we are still struggling to develop new financial models for such programmes, perhaps the major barrier is recognition. This issue can be viewed at three different levels.

1. The first level is a more societal issue of how we recognise learning (or attainment). at the moment this tends to be through the possession of accreditation or certification from accredited institutions. Recognition takes the form of entry into a profession or job, promotion to a higher level or increased pay.
2. The second level is that of accreditation. Who should be able to provide such accreditation and perhaps more importantly what should it be for (this raises the question of curriculum).
3. The third is the issue of assessment. Although traditional forms of individual assessment can be seen as holding back more innovative and group based forms of teaching and learning there are signs of movement in this direction – see, for example the Jisc Effective Assessment in a Digital Age, featured as his post of the year by Stephen Downes.

These issues can be overcome and I think there are significant moves towards recognising broader forms of learning in different contexts. In this respect, the development of Personal Learning Environments and Personal Learning Networks are an important step forward in allowing access to both technology and sources of learning to those not enrolled in an institution.

However, such ‘progress’ is not without contradiction. One of the main gains of social democratic and workers movements over the last century has been to win free access to education and training for all based on nee4d rather than class or income. OK, there are provisos. Such gains were for those in rich industrialised countries – in many areas of the world children still have no access to secondary education – let alone university. Even in those rich countries, there are still big differences in terms of opportunities based on class. And it should not be forgotten that whilst workers movements have fought for free and universal access to education, it has been the needs of industry and the economic systems which have tended to prevail in extending access (and particularly in moulding the forms of provision (witness the widely different forms of the education systems in northern Europe).

Now those gains are under attack. With pressures on econo0mies due of the collapse of the world banking system, governments are trying to roll back on the provision of free education. In countries like the UK, the government is to privatise education – both through developing a market driven system and through transferring the cost of education from the state to the individual or family.

Students have led an impressive (and largely unexpected) fightback in the UK and the outcome of this struggle is by no means clear. Inevitably they have begun to reflect on the relation between their learning and the activities they are undertaking in fighting the increases in fees and cutbacks in finances, thus raising the issue of the wider societal purposes and forms of education.

And that also poses issues for those of us who have viewed the adoption of technology for learning as an opportunity for innovation and change in pedagogy and for extending learning (through Open Education) to those outside schools and universities. How can we defend traditional access to institutional learning, whilst at the same time attacking it for its intrinsic limitations.

At their best, both the movements around Open Education and the student movement against cuts have begun to pose wider issues of pedagogy and the purpose and form of education as will as the issues of how we recognise learning. One of the most encouraging developments in the student movement in the UK has been the appropriation of both online and physical spaces to discuss these wider issues (interestingly in opposition to the police who have in contrast attempted to close access to spaces and movement through he so-called kettling tactic).

I wonder now, if it is possibel to bring together the two different movements to develop new visions of education together with a manifesto or rather manifestos for aschieveing such visions.

Norm Friesen has taken a look at the use of commercial and social software applications for Personal Learning Environments in a paper published in First Monday and entitled ‘Education and the Social Web. Connective learning and the Commercial Imperative‘.

The major thrust of his argument is that services such as Facebook, Twitter and Digg or even Google are designed around the interests of advertisers rather than of users.

Particularly interesting is Friesen’s point  that such services deny any negative responses or the ability to express disapproval or dissent. So whilst the Facebook ‘like ‘ button populates thousands of web sites there is no such button for dislike. Equally Twitter tells you when you have followers, but not when someone has chosen no longer to follow you. The business model of commercial social networks is based on advertising, assisted by data collection and powerful tracking and analysis capabilities.

Freiesen concludes that the pattern of suppressing division, negativity and interpersonal dissent runs counter to common models for pedagogic engagement and interaction. Commercial software services by design serve other priorities than learning, indeed they are often opposed to it.

Friesen reiterates the social process of education, but does not see knowledge as being exclusively embodies in networks of connection an affiliation, in the way some researchers have.

It is hard to argue with much that Norm Friesen says in this paper. However, there are other models for social software applications, other than advertising. Indeed, the last sic months has seen increasing numbers of previously free applications launching premium services (either for extra fiunctionaility or file space or to get rid of the advertisements!).

Nevertheless I have always been wary of the idea of basing a Personal Learning Environment on Facebook or Google.  Facebook offers far too little user control. Google, on the other had, produces some excellent software tools, which can be used as part of a PLE without long term dependencies, I think.

Norm Friesen limited himself to commercial providers in his paper. However applications like Buddypress and Elgg, both available as Open Source, have growing social functionality. Furthermore for those users willing to learn a little, they offer plenty of opportunities for designing their use. It may be that it is that process of design which is mots important in developing a Personal Learning Environment. I have written before of how the PLE itself should be seen as outcome of learning as well as a process. Probably the major failure of commercial social software services is that they deny the user that involvement in the design process.

And going beyond the issues Norm raises, the issue of control is once more bubbling near the surface. Whilst most institutions have been looking at the possible cost advantages of using cloud services, the service providers have shown though the wikileaks saga how susceptible they are to governmental and commercial pressures.

I picked up this video from Jim Groom. Jim says “erchache2000 shared the link to the above video of Isaac Asimov talking with Bill Moyers in “The World of Ideas” back in 1988. His fascinating discussion of the idea of computer mediated instruction being anything but dehumanizing. I love Asimov’s idea that rather reproducing a model of privilege that had been available only to the few, i.e. 1-on-1 instruction, is now available to the many: the one-to-one amongst the many. He gets beautifully at how the internet allows for a radically different paradigm for thinking about education, while at the same time touches on the thrust behind unschooling when talking about not only allowing, but encouraging, kids to follow their own interests. What’s more, Asimov seems so cool in this video, I love his final comment “why not?…why not?” Spoken like a true believer, I love that about this video, it’s speculative, visionary, and in many ways idealistic—what we don’t seem to realize is we have that platform, and it’s time for us to use it with some of that vision.”

I am just about recovering from an interesting but hectic five days in Berlin last week.

On Monday and Tuesday we had a meeting of the European funded G8WAY project. Just to recap for new readers this project is looking at the issues involved in educational transitions, particularly between school and university and university and work, and is seeking to develop social software to support such transitions.

Much of the first year of the project has been taken up in researching the issues. Particularly interesting is the stories of young people which have been collected by the partners and posted on the web site. From these stories we have refined down three key persona and in parallel have been looking at the potential for interventions. This in itself raises a series of ethical issues. Do young people want us to intervene? (teacher leave the kids alone!). How much can the ‘collective’ project team claim expertise to intervene? And if we are merely raising opportunities for story telling and peer support is that an intervention?

And of course last week came the hard part. Just what can we expect to achieve in a small funded two year project. How from all the ideas we have do we take this decision? These issues not withstanding, the meeting made progress and I will report further on our next years plan of work in the near future.

On Wednesday, we held an On-line Educa Berlin pre-conference workshop on ‘Careers 2.0 – Supporting educational transitions with Web 2.0 and social software.’ (I have a horrible feeling I wrote the title. I promise I will stop putting 2.0 after everything now – I know it is an annoying habit).

The workshop was a lot of fun, because of the lengthy and detailed planning that had gone into it, the enthusiasm of our guest speakers and the participation of the audience. I am not sure if we videoed it but I thought that Tabea, Magda and myself ‘acting’ or role playing young people telling their transition stories was one hundred times more effective than if we had done the usual powerpoint presentation of our findings. Participants also gave us much useful feedback for the project which once more I will publish here as soon as it is written up.

And then on to Online Educa itself. It was a somewhat hectic three days for me. Besides the pre-conference workshop, we presented two on line radio shows in our Sounds of the Bazaar series, I presented a paper on Vygotsky and Personal Learning Environments, I chaired a session on Open Education Resources and took part in a debate – Is the LMS dead?

This pretty much took up all of my time so my impressions of the conference may be a bit limited. Online Educa is a great social occasion and it was brilliant to catch up with so many friends from many different countries. But to me at least the conference felt a little flat – it was hard to detect any discernible buzz. If there was a meme it was that the future is mobile but that is hardly new! The debate on the Is the LMS Dead? was a little strange. there were four of us in the debate – Larry Johnson, from The New Media Consortium, USA, Roger Larsen, formerly from Fronter and now taken over by Pearson Platforms, Norway, Richard Horton, from Blackboard International, UK and myself.

I was ready for a good bad tempered debate with lots of sneaky point scoring (especially after having consorted with the enemy from Blackboard over a bottle of wine the previous evening). But they never offered any real defence. Roger basically said we need an LMS as an extra layer of software – to enable single sign on and that sort of thing to provide easy access to social software. Indeed he opened up by saying he agreed the LMS was dead! And all Richard could say to defend Blackboard was that institutions needed applications for management and administration. But neither pretended any learning value for their respective platforms – indeed neither really seemed to want to talk about learning. So maybe the LMS is dead – they are simply giving up. And maybe the real debate is not with fronter or Blackboard but with Moodle.

Anyway a big shoutout to everyone I met last week. And many thanks to our ;crew for all their hard work – to Eileen, Judith, Klaus, Dirk and Jen.