Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

Although Google+ has been generally welcomed the advent of yet another social networking site has given rise to some thoughts on just exactly what value such sites are.

In a perceptive blog post George Siemens writes:

I’ve concluded that most of the hype around social media is nonsense and that people, particularly the self-proclaimed social media elite are clothing-less……What has social media actually done? Very, very little. The reason? Social media is about flow, not substance…….Twitter/Facebook/G+ are secondary media. They are a means to connect in crisis situations and to quickly disseminate rapidly evolving information. They are also great for staying connected with others on similar interests (Stanley Cup, Olympics). Social media is good for event-based activities. But terrible when people try to make it do more – such as, for example, nonsensically proclaiming that a hashtag is a movement. The substance needs to exist somewhere else (an academic profile, journal articles, blogs, online courses).

It is difficult not to agree. Even on twitter – to date my preferred social network – the ratio of conversation to proclamation – or information sharing – seems to be decreasing. Or is this a reverse power  effect – is it that the more people you follow the less the social interactions?

I think the problem is context. Social media work well in a particular context – be it talking with close friends and family – keeping people up to date on your movement or planning holidays – or around conferences and events, planning projects or seeking jobs. However social media is far less strong in the context of everyday life flows. Indeed the only aspect of context that social media seems good at is geo-awareness with all the privacy issues that brings.

It may be important though to distinguish between social media ‘in the wild’ – Facebook, Twitter and Google+ web sites – and the integration of social media within more specific and contextually defined web tools to support activities, learning or communities. Twitters success may be down to its relatively open development environment making it easy to embed twitter flows into blogs or community web sites.

Not withstanding the debate over the use of real names in Google+ and acknowledging the interest in the playful use of alternative identities, the issue of linking real life worlds and social media worlds seems an important one. As George says “substance needs to exist somewhere else”. But whilst George is posting that substance in the academic world, such substance may lie in different facets of our lives – within work, play or the community.

Yet I suspect those corporations developing social media applications have little interest in such substance. The substance for them is in the advertising and commercial world which produces them profit, the ultimate arbiter of success for social media companies. I have written before that the future of social media may lie in more focused and niche networks and communities – communities which can link our online and off line activities and enrich both. But such communities will have to be developed from  the bottom up. And in this context the issue of design will involve much more than cool tools and applications – or indeed encouraging us to follow ever more ‘friends’.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog entry questioning the future role of universities. “At the moment education institutions can fall back of their function in providing recognised qualifications”, I wrote. “Although the degree of regulation regarding qualifications and the weight such qualifications carry for employment varies between sectors and countries, in general we might expect that increasingly employers will look to a person’s digital identity and digital record of learning, rather than accepting qualifications as the basis for employment.”

A recent survey of 502 Small and Medium Enterprises  by consultants, the Centre for Enterprise and reported in the Guardian newspaper, provides further food for thought on this issue. The survey found found that 88% were not planning to recruit graduates during the recession. Even more – 89% – have not recruited a recent graduate in the last year.

“Almost a third – 32% – of the firms surveyed that said they were not hiring graduates told the pollsters that nothing would make them recruit a graduate in the next year.

Almost half – 48% – said they had no job vacancies at any level and 39% said they did not need graduate-level skills in their businesses. Twenty-nine per cent said they would need to change their business strategy to require a recent graduate, and 11% said they wanted more experienced employees than recent graduates.”

According to the Guardian “the survey also revealed that some firms did not understand the differences between A-levels and degrees. Thousands of graduates may be being overlooked, the poll showed, as almost a third – 29% – of businesses think A-levels are graduate-level qualifications, while 18% think GCSEs are equivalent to a degree.”

“Most of the businesses in the poll said they selected employees according to the skills and experience they had, rather than their degree classification and subject. Thirty-eight per cent of the firms said they did not set out to recruit graduates, but had done so in the past because they were stronger candidates than non-graduates.”

Of course this could just be the effect of the recession but I very much doubt it. The survey chimes with interviews I have had with managers of Small and Medium Enterprises in the UK. Of course there may be a perception by employers that graduates are more expensive (they may be right) and are more likely to move on. But most employers I talked with were interested in the experience potential employees could bring to the business. Indeed one employer in North Wales told me he took on people according to recommendations from existing staff – an analogue recommender system!

And of course employers are concerned about the competence of staff. Whilst prepared to provide some on the job training, most expect employees to be competent before they start work. This raises a series of questions about the nature of competence and where it is acquired (see forthcoming blog post).

But I question whether the present university curricula are suited to providing the skills and competences (if these are indeed tow different things) – still less the experience employers are looking for. And again I wonder if this should be a core function of university. Why not provide such work related skills and competences through vocational training programmes.

At an ideological level the development of a mass education system in the UK has been underpinned by the idea that the high technology, knowledge based economy which politicians insist is the future requires ever increasing numbers of knowledge workers – i.e graduates. Yet there seems very little evidence to back this up.

From talking to students – or students to be – I get the increasing impression that going to university is becoming seen as a rites of passage, as a way of leaving home and having three mad social years before getting down to serious work.

Either way it doesn’t add up. A return to the former elitism of university entrance is hardly desirable. But the development, funding and recognition of vocational education and training and of work based learning as equivalent in (social) value to a university degree might be a step forward.

Just finished our latest Jisc Evolve / Educamp online seminar. This one was on the topic of Enterprise 2.0 and featured presentations by Pat Parslow and Willms Buhse. I thoroughly enjoyed Pat’s presentation which should be online tomorrow.
But Willms’ presentation and the subsequent discussion became bogged down over the issue of digital natives (which he defined as anyone born after 1980) although he later agreed that the term was possibly not too useful.
I would go further than that. The term was dreamed up with no research to support it but became popular in the media. OK – these things happen. But it is totally useless for trying to discuss any real development and use of new technologies.
Repeated research has shown that age is not the only or even the main determinate in patterns of uptake and use of technologies for learning and exchange of knowledge. My own modest research into the use of ICT for learning based on case studies in 106 enterprises in Europe suggested that older workers were more likely to use social software for developing and exchanging learning and knowledge. This, we hypothesised, was because they often had more autonomy in undertaking their work and in using learning in the workplace. If that is true, then work organisation would seem to be the most important factor in introducing social software in enterprises. Amd that has nothing to do with digital natives!

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.