Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

Last week the Pontydysgu crew were at the Freie Universitat, Berlin for the European Conference on Educational Research. As last year we were working with ECER on amplifying the conference. This included video streaming the three keynote sessions, filming interviews with 11 of the ECER network conveners and broadcasting three live radio shows. The radio hows are already online on this site and will soon be available on the ECER web pages. We will also be updating the programme information to provide more transparent access to the contents! The videos will take a little longer for editing and post processing.

We also experimented this year with using AudioBoo as a semi live audio stream. I have to admit this was inspired by AltC who had announced a live video station from their 2011 co0nference. i was jealous but also aware that we did not have the resources to emulate this. But AudioBoo requires little in the way of resources, other than an iPod, an internet connecti9on, some imagination and of course, great people to talk to. And we found plenty of people at ECER. There were something like 2300 participants enrolled at the conference from all over the world. And although we only managed to talk to a very few of the delegates, I think the AudiBoos work well in conveying the atmosphere and feel of the conference to a remote audience.

However where the Boos work best is where delegates are explaining their research interests, the things that they are passionate about. Listen for example to Benedicte Gendron from Montpelier University in France talking about emotional capital. In the past we have often seemed to have a split between papers and books being seen as media for serious research with audio being reserved for more popularist versions fo the same. I am not sure this divide is necessary. Indeed it could be fun to try using audio for the hard stuff, with easier electronic versions of papers being provided alongside. Video can be an intrusive media and to do it well needs some considerable resources. Audio is not in any way so intrusive and can be recorded on mobile devices. And I think in future conferences, it could be interesting just to arrange turn up at the end of a session and interview one of the presenters about their ideas.

Anyway thanks to all of our crew – to Jo, Jake, Judith, Klaus, Raymond and Dirk. many thanks also to Angelika, to Herr Goldenbaum and the ECER staff who were so helpful to us and of course to everyone who participated in our media fest.

Another blogpost coming up about content and ideas from the conference.

Here is a quick update on some current work at Pontydysgu. With funding from the European Lifelong Learning Programme G8WAY project and the European Research Framework Mature-IP project, and working with a growing community of partners, we have been developing a series of Web 2.0 tools to support careers guidance. At the moment we are developing a  new web site which will give full access to these tools and applications, as well as to research about the use of Web 2.0 and social software for careers information, advice and guidance. Below is a summary of these tools. If you are interested in finding out more about any of these tools or about our approach to using technology to support careers guidance please get in touch.

Labour Market Visualisation Tools

We are developing tools and applications for visualising Labour Market Information in order to provide young people with an informed basis for decision making around career directions and to support the careers guidance professionals who advise young people. This work has been undertaken in conjunction with the Institute for Employment Research, University of Warwick and Careers Wales.

RadioActive

RadioActive is a project using internet radio to assist young people, particularly those from a NEETS (Not in Employment, Education, or Training) background in developing decision making and communication skills. This approach focuses on informal learning and the development of communities of practice through the use of new technologies. The approach is being piloted in conjunction with the University of East London, Yoh, a Hackney based youth agency, and Inspire!, the Education Business Partnership for the London Borough of Hackney.

Storiboard

Storiboard is a Web 2.0 tool for storytelling. In the first year of the G8WAY project we found that storytelling is a powerful tool for developing and reflection on careers biographies. Storiboard allows young people to use multimedia including video, audio and graphics to tell their careers stories and aspirations. It is initially being tested  through using the original stories collected in year one of the project and will then be piloted with UK based careers services.

Webquests

We are developing a series of Web 2.0 webquests designed to support professional development for Careers Guidance professionals. The first two are on the use of the internet for Careers Guidance and on careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM). Along with our technical partners, Raycom, we are developing a lightweight repository which combined with the Storiboard interface, will provide for easy editing and development of Webquests.

Late last year Jenny Hughes made a keynote presentation on Evaluation 2.0 for the UK Evaluation society. And pretty quickly we were getting requests for the paper of the presentation and the presentation slides. The problem is that we have not yet got round to writing the paper. And Jen, like me uses most of her canvas space for pictures not bullet points on her slides. This makes the presentation much more attractive but it is difficult sometimes to gleam the meaning from the pictures alone.

So we decided we would make a slidecast of the presentation. But, half way through, we realised it wasn’t working. Lacking an audience and just speaking to the slides, it was coming over as stilted and horribly dry. So we started again and changed the format. rather than seeing it as a straightforward presentation, Jen and I just chatted about the central ideas. I think it works pretty well.

We started from the question of what is Web2.0.Jen says “At its simplest, it’s about using social software at all stages of the evaluation process in order to make it more open, more transparent and more accessible to a wider range of stakeholder.” But editing the slidecast I realised we had talked a lot more than about evaluation. This chat really deals with Web 2.0 and the different ways we are developing and sharing knowledge, the differences between expert knowledge and crows sourced knowledge and new roles for teachers, trainers and evaluators resulting from the changing uses of social media.

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’.

Like many of you I guess, I have been playing around with Google+ this weekend. And, unlike the clunky experience when Wave first came out, it is fun. Google seem to have got it more or less right in judging when to make a new app at least partly open to the world. Too soon, it doesn’t work and puts people off. Too late, not enough user feedback to be able to judge whether you are going in the right direction.

Google+ has four main ‘areas’. Like most social software interfaces it provides an activity stream but with the ability to switch between different ‘group’ views. These groups are set up through Circles which provides a visual interface to grouping your social network. the interface is pretty intuitive, although it looks far better on my large screen iMac than on my notebook. Working out how to group different contacts is another questions though. I guess I would like the ability to set up subcircles, so I could put all my project colleagues in a circle called projects, and then sub circles for each different project (although you can add people into as many circles as you like already.

Sparks is a little underwhelming, providing essentially access to saved searches, but with little functionality, for instance the features of advanced search, or the ability to add RSS feeds.

Hangout is cool, providing audio and video as well as text conferencing based on a circle or individual members of a circle. I have only tried it with one person so far and the interface and quality was stunning. Be interesting what it looks like with more people. It needs more functionality such as the ability to share files and to share urls and well as just Youtube video but i guess that will be added to in the next few days.

The interface is very clean free of all the usual Facebook clutter. And at the moment it is advert free, though I can’t see that surviving long term. At the moment it is rather sealed off but rumour says Google have develop a full API for + which will be rolled out at some point. Picasso is also built in with a free 7MB storage area for photos.

Perhaps most refreshing is that Google seem to have learned the lesson from Facebook about ownership and privacy. Content is owned by the user and you can get your content out of the application. That is vital for use in education.

And Google+ provides fine grained privacy with the ability to decide who you share with on an action by action basis.

The only thing I have struggled with is the Android App. The reviews say it is very good but I can’t persuade it to conect with my .mac account, rather than my gmail account, which I only use occasionally.

Who is it for? The press reviews tend to think Google is taking on Facebook directly. I am not so sure. Only last week I speculated that the real target for many new social networking apps is the enterprise market, previously the preserve of smaller social networking companies such as Yammer. And linked to Google docs and other cloud services (I assume there will be some levels of integration int he near future) Google+ looks a good contender. Whilst Facebook is a good market place for advertising and publicity, be it for enterprises or education, its shortcomings in terms of ownership and privacy really make it a non starter as far as serious social networking goes. Will people trust Google? I guess it largely depends how they behave. But so far they seem to have learned the lesson from previous less successful ventures into the social networking jungle, and are playing up the privacy aspects of +.

Next week Facebook are expected to hit back with a release of Skype for Facebook. But Skype is now owned by Microsoft and I can’t help thinking Google have timed this well in terms of offering a simple to use free service for video and audio conferencing. Certainly I am going to give it a go for project meetings. The world of social networking is certainly not dull at the moment!

The latest figures for Facebook are interesting. Facebook appears to have had fewer monthly active users at the start of June than at the start of May in the US, UK and Canada — at least according to one data source — even as it has grown bigger than ever worldwide. this could suggest that the market is by now saturated or even that people are moving on.

My own take is that whilst Facebook has alienated significant numbers of people with rampant commercialism and a cavalier attitude to privacy this is probably only amongst early adopters and the tech community. More important is the growth of more niche social networking applications.

Although Linkedin can hardly be described as niche, it is interesting to see the growth of Linkedin Groups and the high level of activity – at least in the groups of which I am a member.

I suspect people are increasingly separating out their presence (and digital identities) in different social networking applications and communities. And whilst size may be good, in terms of income the ‘professional’ social networks may turn out to be more sustainable and profitable tin the long term.

Interesting then to see the launch of a professional networking application for Facebook. In the last few weeks i have had some tens of messages saying:

“I’d like you to join my professional network on Facebook.

Graham – it’s professional networking with friends and friends of friends on Facebook. Feels like it can be very valuable to us.”

The messages come from a Facebook app called BranchOut. Given they all had the same wording I ignored them, but thinking about this blog post I did have a look. But once more I was put off by the privacy or lack of it. Although the video from BranchOut makes a big point that they will not access your photos, it asks for permissions to your wall, to all of your friends and demands an email address to send mail.

I guess once they have your friends list, they are auto spamming with messages such as above. Although once more this may result in rapid growth, I doubt it will do much for their reputation.

Linkedin may be a little staid and boring. But at least it seems to have evolved sensible privacy rules.

I think this will be critical for anyone trying to break into the social networking market.

A quick update. I have been slow posting lately due to travelling around and a series of project meetings.

We are moving forward on a series of ideas and developments.

Firstly we are working with The Univeristy of East London, the Hackeny Education – Business Partnership and a Yoiuth Organisation called Go! to launch Radiocative, an internet radion station run by young people for young people.

Secondly we are developing a new application for online story telling.

Thirdly I have been doing demos of our new open and linked data application for supporting young people in planning careers and providing information for careers advisors. Early feedback has been very positive and I am hopeful we will be able to roll this out for an extended trial after the summer. Before that though, I want to develop a social layer, allowing data outputs to be discussed  and incorporated in wider social discourses.

The explosion of powerful, innovative and free to use social software has transformed the potential approaches to using technology for teaching and learning. Long gone are the days when e-learning meant logging on to a Blackboard system. However, this reliance on commercial providers, for many of whom education is not a major part of their business plan, has its downside.

Data security is obviously an issue, although I suspect most commercial providers systems are more secure than the average school or university. More seriously services may cease to be provided for free, overrun by intrusive advertising, or even cease operating. At some point or other, all companies, even Twitter will be looking to generate revenue. In Twitters case this seems to be through the introduction of new features like email notification that many of us do not want, to probably provide a new outlet for advertising.

What is the answer? Providing such services in-house seems a tall order, although some universities, see SAPO Campus, are attempting to develop social software as part of an approach to Personal Learning Environments. The problem here though is that many social software services depend on scale to provide real traction as a learning tool. Furthermore, it is doubtful as to whether institutions can continue to provide access and services, long after students have finished a course.

For some time we have been talking about the importance of learners being able to manage their own digital identity. Perhaps it is time this idea was extended to students learning how to steward their content, be it micro blogs, photos, video or other online content. The growing availability of cheap cloud based storage may make this task easier. But there may be a pedagogic gain to be made from looking more carefully at stewarding. Stewarding would involve thinking about what is important and what is not, and the interlinking between different aspects of online activity and artefacts. In other words it would involve reflection. And reflection on learning, whilst almost universally advocated as a learning strategy, has been far less easy to foster in practice.

The idea of Open Education has come a long way in the last two years. Massive Online Open Courses are becoming more common (with the announcement of the “mother of all MOOCs” on Change: Education, Learning and Technology exciting great interest in the edu-blogosphere), conferences and seminars being streamed online and Open Educational Resources have entered the mainstream.

What has been learned in this process?

Firstly the model of courses which are free to participants but charge for institutional enrollment and for certification appears to be gaining traction. How far this can go depends I guess on the extent that participation (and recording of work) becomes recognised as achievement. It will also depend on how much value universities and other institutions think they can gain (or stand to lose) through such a model.

Secondly most of these programmes are using all manner of social software and Open Source applications. There seems to be a growing practice of hanging programmes together around open webinars, with students using their own blogs or other social software for their personal work. One of the less successful experiments seems to be attempts to integrate VLEs, especially Moodle, within MOOCs. Participants are being encouraged to develop their own Personal Learning Environments as part of the process.

Thirdly such initiatives place great emphasis on peer support for learning, with a greater or lesser extent of formal learning support and formalization of networks. One greatly encouraging development is the blurring of the boundary between teachers and learners. Another is the involvement of people form different organisations in leading, facilitating or stewarding such programmes. Most stewards or facilitators are not being paid, although I suspect at present this is being accepted by institutions as a legitimate part of their work as researchers. Whatever, this is resulting in a weakening of institutional boundaries and the emergence of stronger communities of practice.

There also seems to be considerable pedagogic innovation, with a willingness to explore new ways of learning. Especially encouraging is the use of multi media, which although promised in so many formal elearning programmes, has seldom really happened.

Now comes the big question. Can the experience gained from the MOOCs be extended to provide a transferable and scalable model for Open Education.

I’ve already talked about the issue of recognition which I see not so much as a question of assessment but of social recognition of achievement. But there are other open issues. How do we deal with language barriers? More critically, most participants in the early MOOCs seem to be professionals, teachers and researchers already engaged in online learning or multi media and / or students. In other words, people with a fair degree of competence in communicating through on-line media. The model is based on a large degree of self motivation and is reliant on learners being able to manage both their own learning and able to develop their own support networks. This is a pretty big limitation.

I see two ways to deal with this. One is to provide more formal and institutional support through participation in MOOCs becoming part of courses on which learners are already enrolled and their host institution providing support. This idea is already being suggested for the Change: Education, Learning and Technology MOOC. The second is through developing more fomalised individual and group mentoring and support systems. At the moment, we are tending to focus on presenters as the key people in facilitating the online programmes. But such a second layer of mentors could play the critical role, and providing such mentoring could be a key part of Continuing Professional Development for teachers and trainers. In other words, a win, win situation.