Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

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.

I have been invited to particpate in a workshop on ‘Technology Enhanced Learning in the context of technological, societal and cultural transformation‘, being sponsored by the EU funded Stellar Network of Excellence at Garnisch in Germany at teh start of December. I am contributing to a session on Work Based Learning and have written a short position paper on the subject, a draft of which is reproduced below. I have to say I am very much impressed with the work of the London Mobile Learning Group and my paper attempts to look at  the idea we have developed for a Work Oriented MoBile Learning Environment (WOMBLE) through the Mature-IP project in the light of their framework for a socio-cultural ecology for mobile learning.

1. A socio-cultural ecology for learning

In his paper, The socio-cultural ecological approach to mobile learning: an overview, Norbert Pachler characterises current changes in the world from a perspective on mobile learning as “akin to social, cultural, media related, technological and semiotic transformation”. The world around us, he says, is “marked by fluidity, provisionality and instability, where responsibilities for meaning making as well as others such as risk-taking have been transferred from the state and institutions to the individual, who has become a consumer of services provided by a global market”. The paper, based on conceptual and theoretical work being undertaken by the London Mobile Learning group, proposes a socio-cultural ecology for learning, based on the “new possibilities for the relationship between learning in and across formal and formal contexts, between the classroom and other sites of learning.” Such an ecology is based on the interplay between agency, cultural practices and structures.

In this short discussion paper, we will consider the possibilities for such an ecology in the context of work-based learning. In particular, we will examine work being undertaken through the EU funded Mature-IP project to research and develop the use of a Work Oriented MoBile Learning Environment (Womble) to support learning and knowledge maturing within organisations.

2. Work-based Learning and Technology

Although it is hard to find reliable quantitative data, it would appear that there has been a steady increase in work-based learning in most countries. This may be due to a number of reasons: probably foremost in this is the pressures for lifelong learning die to technological change and changing products, work processes and occupational profiles. Work-based learning is seen as more efficient and effective and facilitates situated learning. The move towards work-based learning has been accompanied in many countries by a revival in apprenticeship training. It has also been accompanied by a spread of the training function (Attwell and Baumgartl (eds.), 2008), with increasing numbers of workers taking some responsibility for training as part of their job.

The move towards increased work-based training has also been accompanied by the widespread us of Technology Enhanced Learning, at least in larger companies. However, this has not been unproblematic. Technology Enhanced Learning may be very effective where the work processes themselves involve the use of computers. It is also possible to develop advanced simulations of work processes; however such applications are complex and expensive to develop. More commonly, in the classical sense of the dual system, formal Technology Enhanced Learning has been used to support the theoretical side of vocational learning, with practical learning taking place through work-based practice (with greater or lesser face to face support). Given economies of scale, Technology Enhanced Learning has made most impact in vocational learning in those areas with a broad occupational application such as management, sales and ICT. In a previous paper I suggested that the development of technology for learning has been shaped by an educational paradigm, based on an industrial model of schooling developed to meet the needs and forms of a particular phase of capitalist and industrial development and that this paradigm is now becoming dysfunctional. Friesen and Hug argue that “the practices and institutions of education need to be understood in a frame of reference that is mediatic: “as a part of a media-ecological configuration of technologies specific to a particular age or era.” This configuration, they say, is one in which print has been dominant. They quote McLuhan who has described the role of the school specifically as the “custodian of print culture” (1962.) It provides, he says, a socially sanctioned “civil defense against media fallout” — against threatening changes in the mediatic environs.

Research suggests there has been little take up of formal Technology Enhanced Learning in the Small and Medium Enterprises which comprise the greatest growth area in many economies (Attwell (ed.), 2004). However the research, undertaken through an EU funded project into the use of ICT for learning in Small and Medium Enterprises, found the widespread everyday use of internet technologies for informal learning, utilizing a wide range of business and social software applications. This finding is confirmed by a recent study on the adoption of social networking in the workplace and Enterprise 2.0 (Oliver Young G (2009). The study found almost two-thirds of those responding (65%) said that social networks had increased either their efficiency at work, or the efficiency of their colleagues. 63% of respondents who said that using them had enabled them to do something that they hadn’t been able to do before

Of course such studies beg the question of the nature and purpose of the use of social software in the workplace. The findings of the ICT and SME project, which was based on 106 case studies in six European countries focused on the use of technologies for informal learning. The study suggested that although social software was used for information seeking and for social and communication purposes it was also being widely used for informal learning. In such a context:

• Learning takes place in response to problems or issues or is driven by the interests of the learner
• Learning is sequenced by the learner
• Learning is episodic
• Learning is controlled by the learner in terms of pace and time
• Learning is heavily contextual in terms of time, place and use
• Learning is cross disciplinary or cross subject
• Learning is interactive with practice
• Learning builds on often idiosyncratic and personal knowledge bases
• Learning takes place in communities of practice

However, it is important to note that the technology was not being used for formal learning, nor in the most part was it for following a traditionally curriculum or academic body of knowledge.

Instead business applications and social and networking software were being used to develop what has been described as Work Process Knowledge (Boreham, N. Samurçay, R. and Fischer, M. 2002).

The concept of Work Process Knowledge emphasises the relevance of practice in the workplace and is related to concepts of competence and qualification that stress the idea that learning processes not only include cognitive, but also affective, personal and social factors. They include the relevance of such non-cognitive and affective-social factors for the acquisition and use of work process knowledge in practical action. Work often takes place, and is carried out, in different circumstances and contexts. Therefore, it is necessary for the individual to acquire and demonstrate a certain capacity to reflect and act on the task (system) and the wider work environment in order to adapt, act and shape it. Such competence is captured in the notion of “developmental competence” (Ellstroem PE, 1997) and includes ‘the idea of social shaping of work and technology as a principle of vocational education and training’ (Heidegger, G., Rauner F., 1997). Work process knowledge embraces ‘developmental competence’, the developmental perspective emphasising that individuals have the capacity to reflect and act upon the environment and thereby forming or shaping it. In using technologies to develop such work process knowledge, individuals are also shaping or appropriating technologies, often developed or designed for different purposes, for social learning.

3. Knowledge Maturing, Personal Learning Environments and Wombles

MATURE is a large-scale integrating project (IP), co-funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). It runs from April 2008 to March 2012. The Mature-IP aims to research, develop and test Personal Learning and Maturing Environments (PLME) and Organisational Learning and Maturing Environments (OLME) in promote the agility of organisations. Agility requires that companies and their employees together and mutually dependently learn and develop their competencies efficiently in order to improve productivity of knowledge work. The aim is to leverage the intrinsic motivation of employees to engage in collaborative learning activities, and combine it with a new form of organisational guidance. For that purpose, MATURE conceives individual learning processes to be interlinked (the output of a learning process is input to others) in a knowledge-maturing process in which knowledge changes in nature. This knowledge can take the form of classical content in varying degrees of maturity, but also involves tasks and processes or semantic structures. The goal of MATURE is to understand this maturing process better, based on empirical studies, and to build tools and services to reduce maturing barriers.

The Mature-IP project has undertaken a series of studies looking at learning and knowledge maturing processes within organisations. Based on this work, in year 2 of the project, it is undertaking a series of five Design Projects, developing and testing prototypes of technology based applications to support knowledge maturing within these organisations. One of these projects, the Work Oriented MoBile Learning Environment (Womble), is designed to enable workers to appropriate the mobile phone as a Personal Learning Maturing Environment (PLME) and to support contextualised Work-based Learning, problem-solving, interaction and knowledge maturing via a user owned, mobile PLE.

The design study/demonstrator includes support for structured learning dialogue frameworks, with a social software ‘substrate’ and multi- user / multi-media spaces that will provide workers with the ability to collaborate with co-workers. At the most basic level, Womble services will, for example, allow workers to tag fellow work colleagues (contacts); when a problem arises this service will enable collaborative problem solving. At a more advanced stage a ‘lite’ dialogue game service will be linked to the tagging of personal competencies to scaffold workers in their active collaboration and ‘on the spot’ problem solving.

4. The Womble and a socio-cultural ecology for learning

The conceptual framework proposed by Norbert Pachler and the London Mobile Learning Group (LMLG) proposes a non-hierarchal model based on the interaction between agency, cultural practices and structures. In the penultimate section of this discussion document, we examine how the deign of the Womble matches the framework proposed by the LMLG.

4.1 Agency

Agency is seen by Pachler as “the capacity to deal with and to impact on socio cultural structures and established cultural practices” and “to construct one’s life-world and to use media for meaning making…..”

The aim of the Womble is to develop a “participatory culture” in the workplace including ludic forms of problem solving, identity construction, multitasking, “distributed cognition,” and “transmedial navigation” (Jenkins at al, 2006). It is designed to scaffold developmental competence through sense and meaning making in a shared communicative environment, though exploring, questioning and transcending traditional work structures. Situatedness and proximity are key to such an exploration, the ability to seek, capture store, question and reflect on information, in day to day practice. This the use of the Womble for meaning making goes beyond the exploration of formal bodies of expert knowledge to question manifestations of cultural practice within communities.

A further aspect of agency is the ability to shape the form of the Womble as a user configurable and open set of tools. Wild, Mödritscher and Sigurdarson (2008)suggest that “establishing a learning environment, i.e. a network of people, artefacts, and tools (consciously or unconsciously) involved in learning activities, is part of the learning outcomes, not an instructional condition.” They go on to say: “Considering the learning environment not only a condition for but also an outcome of learning, moves the learning environment further away from being a monolithic platform which is personalisable or customisable by learners (‘easy to use’) and heading towards providing an open set of learning tools, an unrestricted number of actors, and an open corpus of artefacts, either pre-existing or created by the learning process – freely combinable and utilisable by learners within their learning activities (‘easy to develop’). ”

4.2 Cultural Practices

By cultural practices, Pachler, refers to “routines in stable situations both in terms of media use on everyday life as well as the pedagogical practices around teaching and learning in the context of educational institutions.” He points out that the multimodality of mobile and media technologies names: them more difficult to map onto traditional curricula and puts pressure on established canons.”

One key idea behind the Womble is that Personal Learning Environments are owned by the user.But at the same time, the Womble tools are designed to make it easy to for users to configure their  environment.

Critically, the pedagogy, if it can be described as such is based on shared practice with learners themselves actively developing learning materials and sharing them through reflection on their context. Whilst such materials might be said to be micro learning materials, the semantic aggregation of those materials, together with advanced search capabilities should provide a holistic organisational learning base. As such the Womble is designed to support , the recognition of context as a key factor in work related and social learning processes. Cook (2009) proposes that new digital media can be regarded as cultural resources for learning and can enable the bringing together of the informal learning contexts in the world outside the institution, or in this case the organisation, with those processes and contexts that are valued inside the intuitions. Cook also suggests that informal learning in social networks is not enabling the “critical, creative and reflective learning that we value in formal education.” Instead he argues for the scaffolding of learning in a new context for learning through learning activities that take place outside formal institutions and on platforms, such as the Womble, that are selected or configured by learners. Such ‘episodic learning’ is based on Vygotskys idea of ‘zones of proximal development’. However, we would agree with Pachler, that in the need for a departure from the terminology associated with Vygostsky’s work. Rather than viewing developmental zones as mainly temporal within a life course, they should be seen as situative contexts within work practice, which both allow the production of user generated content in response to such a situation and reflection on content generated by other users in such situations.

In this context digital artefacts can assist in sense making through the process of bricolage (Levi Strauss, 1966) The concept of bricolage refers to the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signifying objects to produce new meanings in fresh contexts. Bricolage involves a process of resignification by which cultural signs with established meanings are re-organised into new codes of meaning.

This approach to work-based learning through the use mobile devices and services such as the Womble is the relation between work-based activities and personal lives. This goes beyond worklife balance, or even digital identities. It involves agreed and shared understandings of what activities and digital practices are acceptable in work time and work spaces, ethical considerations especially in with regard to work practice involving clients and how private use of social media impacts on work relations.

4.3 Socio cultural and technological structures

Of course critical to such an approach to situated learning, is the ability to utilize mobile devices within work situations. However for this to take place requires more than just the appropriation of user owned technologies (indeed our initial studies suggest resistance to user owned mobile devices being used for work purposes unless funded by the employer. More important is the expropriation of work processes and technologies used for monitoring and recording work processes as the basis for learning. Indeed one aim of the mature project is to overcome the divide between the use of technologies of learning and for knowledge management. Without the ability to transcend these technologies sit is unlikely that the Womble or any other PLE based applications will gain traction and usage. The use of such a learning and knowledge sharing platform has to take place without imposing a substantial additional work and attention burden on the user.

5. Organisational and developmental learning

The use of mobile devices to support situated work-based learning is base don the idea that appropriation of both technologies and processes will lead to the formation of developmental competences based on intrinsic motivation. Barry Nyhan (Nyhan et al, 2003) states “one of the keys to promoting learning organisations is to organise work in such a way that it is promotes human development. In other words it is about building workplace environments in which people are motivated to think for themselves so that through their everyday work experiences, they develop new competences and gain new understanding and insights. Thus, people are learning from their work – they are learning as they work.”

He goes on to say: “This entails building organisations in which people have what can be termed‘ developmental work tasks’. These are challenging tasks that ‘compel’ people to stretch their potential and muster up new resources to manage demanding situations. In carrying out ‘developmental work tasks’ people are ‘developing themselves’ and are thus engaged in what can be termed ‘developmental learning’.”

This notion of developmental competences and learning, using mobile devices and environments such as the Womble, would appear as a way of building on the conceptual framework for a social cultural ecological approach advanced by the London Mobile Learning group.

6. Questions

• Can developmental competences be acquired in the absence of formal and institutional learning?
• How can developmental competences based on informal learning be recognised?
• How can we develop intrinsic motivation for work-based learning and competence development?
• How can we recognise development zones for reflection and learning?
• Is it possible to appropriate social and business processes and applications for learning?
• Is there a continued role for educational technologies if learning materials are user generated and technologies and applications are appropriated?
• What are the socio – technical competences and literacies required to facilitate learners to appropriate technologies?

References

Attwell G and Baumgartl B. (ed.), 2008, Creating Learning Spaces:Training and Professional Development for Trainers, Vienna, Navreme

Attwell G.(ed) 2007, Searching, Lurking and the Zone of Proximal Development, e-learning in Small and Medium enterprises in Europe, Vienna, Navreme

Boreham, N. Samurçay, R. and Fischer, M. (2002) Work Process Knowledge, Routledge

Boushel M, Fawcett M, Selwyn J. (2000), Focus on Early Childhood: Principles and Realities, Blackwell Publishing

Cook, J. (2009), Scaffolding the Mobile wave, Presnetation at the Jisc Institutional Impact programme online meeting, 09/07/09, http://www.slideshare.net/johnnigelcook/cook-1697245?src=embed, accessed 10 July 2009

Ellstroem P. E.  (1997) The many meanings of occupational competence and qualifications, In Brown, A (ed.) Promoting Vocational Education and Training: European Perspectives,University of Tampere Press, Tampere

Friesen N and Hug T (2009), The Mediatic Turn: Exploring Concepts for Media Pedagogy

Heidegger, G., Rauner F. (1997): Vocational Education in Need of Reform, Institut Technik und Bildung, Bremen

Jenkins, H., Purushotoma, R., Clinton, K.A., Weigel, M., and Robison, A. J. (2006). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. White paper co-written for the MacArthur Foundation. Accessed July 14, 2008 from: http://www.projectnml.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf

Levi Strauss C. (1966). The savage mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [first published in 1962]

McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Nyhan, B et al (2003). Facing up to the learning organisation challenge. Vol. I. Thessaloniki, CEDEFOP,

Oliver Young G (2009), Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 to 2013, Forrester

Pachler (forthcoming) The Socio-cultural approach to mobile learning: an overview

Wild F. Mödritscher F. and Sigurdarson S., (2008), Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments, elearning papers, http://www.elearningeuropa.info/out/?doc_id=15055&rsr_id=15972, accessed 2 September, 2008

Here are the remaining podcasts recorded when making the Jisc e-Learning Show.

Rob Ward is Director of the Centre for Recording Learning Achievement. He talks about progressions routes and e-Portfolios in this interview.

Sandra Winfield is project manager at the Centre for International e-Portfolio Development at Nottingham University. She talks about the use of e-Portfolios to support work based learners.

Tony Toole, from the University of Glamorgan, talks about the use of mobile technologies and social networking applications to support work based learners in Wales.

Alan Paull is a consulatant who has been working on the development and implementation of the XCRI standard for exchanging course information. Here he explains what the standard is and how it can be used

 

 Interview with Rob Ward [11:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (584)

 

 Interview with Sandra Winfield [17:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (531)

 

 Interview with Tony Toole [15:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (517)

 

 Interview with Alan Paull [11:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (525)

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!

Interesting survey by the UK Chartered Management Institute and reported in the Guardian newspaper.

“The institute interviewed 1,000 managers aged 35 and under, working in industry, commerce, local government and the police. Their most common complaint was that older bosses regarded the internet as “a massive timewaster”. Half said their organisations did not take up web-based technology until it was tried and tested, and 16% described their employers as “dinosaurs”. The survey found most young managers wanted to use the internet for research, professional development and other aspects of getting the job done. But employers treated it with suspicion. The survey found 65% of organisations monitored usage, rising to 86% in local government and 88% in the police. This led 65% of employers to block access to “inappropriate” sites, rising to 89% in local government and 90% in the utilities. Eighteen per cent of employers limited internet access to certain times of day, rising to 38% in the insurance industry.”

Some two years ago we published the results of a project looking at e-Learning in Small and Medium Enterprises in Europe. We undertook 105 case studies in six different countries. We found few instances of formal e-learning (or formal learning of any kind). However we found extensive use of the internet for informal learning. Older workers were more likely to use ICT for learning than younger staff. This, we concluded, was due to two reasons: older workers were more likely to have unlimited access to the internet becuase of their seniority. And older workers were more likely to have autonomy to use the results of their learning in the workplace.

The Chartered Mangement Instutute survey shows that businesses have still not progressed in their understanding of learning, less still in thinking about innovation. Informal learning is potentially the most powerful driver of innovation. But this requires both access to learning opportunties and work organisations which allow autonomy to utilise learning. Most businesses still don’t get it.

NB Sadly I cannot find an online copy of the Chartered Mangement Institute Survey. Probably costs lots of money. But you can download the book we produced – Searching, Lurking and the Zone of Proximal Development – E-Learning in Small and Medium Enterprises in Europe – for free.

Too busy to blog. Sad isn’t it. I have been on the road for almost all of the last three weeks. And we are also going through a busy time producing things. New software, videos, papers and all the rest. I’ll be rolling out the different products over the next two weeks. And you will hear about them first on this blog.

So here is the first. It is a book on e-learning in Small and Medium Enterprises. Regular readers of this blog may remember I worked on a European Research project called ICT and SMEs. We undertook 105 case studies in seven different European countries. And we made four four thematic studies. The project ended in 2005. But I thought th results were to good not to publish. It has taken ages. But the book is now out.

You can buy the book from Amazon. But here is a special offer to Wales Wide Web readers. I have 50 copies to give away for free. If you would like a copy just email me at grahamattwell [at] gmail [dot] com and I will send you one out.