Most of my time at the conference was spent working on our Amplified project, using multi media and social software to turn the conference outwards and improve the experience for face to face delegates. More reports on this work later in the week.

But I did get to go to two sessions. The first was a symposium entitled ‘Technology WILL NOT save education – views on teaching learning and researching in the Digital Age’ .

Here is the abstract:

Deeply immersed in the Society of Knowledge great efforts, including the use of educational technology have been carried out in order to improve education. Changes in the cultural contexts where education takes place have posed new questions both in educational practice and research. Very often changes in educational practices are subject to factors within the context where they are  pursued and it is probable that the results vary depending on different cultural factors.  Within the field of Educational Technology it becomes essential to manage cultural change in order to make technology happen.

Educational institutions have to provide answers to all agents involved in the educational field: a change of methodology is needed and, in many instances, this will depend upon cultural factors. Thus, cultural contexts have to be taken into consideration in their policies and activities.  Cultural change does not come with technology but with the transformation of educational practices and the revision of  traditional  methodologies. The role of educators is key the same as the position of educational institutions which have to provide the means to facilitate cultural change.

The emergent social networks and Web 2.0 applications have given way to a great variety of educational possibilities which may help consider students, not under traditional categories of race, class and gender but instead taking into account local and global contexts and diversity. Web 2.0 applications are powerful socialization and communication tools that support the process of construction of knowledge and can have an incredible educational potential for instruction.

This symposium seeks to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of research in different fields which provides an outlook from different points of view of teaching, learning and researching in the Digital Age. Its departing point is the assumption that technology will NOT save Education unless cultural change takes place.

The different papers  in this simposium try to account from different viewpoints for aspects which aim at improving education. Thus,  the first paper discusses the need of  networking culture in different disciplines regarding approaches and practices of researchers which have made use of web technologies.   The importante of networking is also revised as a catalyst of social and educational change. The second paper deals with the construction of a new model of curriculum more in relation to new learning needs and approaches  and the eminent role that educators play on it, especially considering their adaptation to change and their practices within teaching and learning processes. The third  paper deals with the use of Personal learning Environments as systems that help learners be in control of their own learning process by setting goals sharing ideas and  managing learning content in both individual and group basis. The last of the papers faces the educational potentialities of Web 2.0 applications as powerful socialization and communication tools that can support processes of knowledge construction and can have an incredible educational potential for Foreign Language instruction.

I chaired the symposium, with my good friends Linda Casteneda, Ricardo Torres and Maria Perifanou presenting and Mar Camacho acting as discussant.

We spent a lot of time thinking about the format, not wishing to do the usual 3 25 minutes presnetations with a short time for questions and discussion. Instead we reverted the usual order, with Mar opening by presenting a brief overview of the ideas behind the symposium and then inviting delegates to provide a brief opinion about our approach.

We then had three ten minute presentations from Linda, Ricardo and Maria. Linda presented research she had undertaken at the University of Murcia in Spain. Basically, despite efforts to introduce technology into the curriculum for student teachers at the university, she concluded little had changed in terms of teaching and learning practice. Her conclusion was that technology on its own will not change anything. To make effective use of new technologies requires fundamental curriculum reform and the development and adoption of new pedagogies for teaching and learning. Ricardo and Maria both reflected on instances of effective practice, drawn from their own work. Ricardo looked at the development of Personal Learning Environments in a programme he teaches in Barcelona. And Maria reported on the development and use of webquests for teaching Italien in Thessaloniki. It had been our intention to group the different issues raised by delegates and speakers and use them to break into smaller discussion groups. However in the end the range of issues and the different levels of experience of participants led us to move towards a single group discussion.

The discussion was successful in terms of the active involvement of nearly all the participants. However it tended to be unfocused. A series of different issues were raised. One prevalent concern was that the rigidity of assessment regimes prevented innovation in pedagogic approaches. Another was the resistance of school and institutional management to change. A third was the attitudes of students, who while expecting the use of technology in teaching and learning, were still reluctant to take control of their own learning processes in the way required for effective use of new pedagogic approaches.

Other issues included digital literacies and teachers dispositions towards using technology for teaching. Whilst they were happy to use it for preparing lessons, for presentations and for administrations, they were less comfortable to use it for teaching and learning in practice.

One interesting issue was who should “set the agenda” for change. One participant was concerned that the way technology was being introduced in education was taking away ‘agency’ from teachers in the classroom.

It was a enjoyable session. But whilst most seemed open to and supportive of our hypothesis, there was little consensus on a way forward.

ECER is a traditional research conference, organised through a series of different disciplinary and topic networks. It will take more than a year to change such a culture but we have made a modest beginning.

We now have a shared flickr group and a Twitter account. Both of those are integrated into the ECER web site. Compared to an educational technology conference, the us eof Twitter is limited but some delegates are beginning to ‘get the point’ and are using the conference #ECER2010 hash tag.

We are producing twelve videos based on interviews with the link conveners who coordinate different networks. Video is a new medium for many of these researchers, used to expressing tehir ideas through research papers, books and symposia. But I am happy with the interveiws we have undertaken so far and think hey will add a new dimension to explaining and sharing ideas.

I have mixed feelings about the video streaming. At a technical level we have learnt a lot. One of the things we wanted to do was provide high quality video. This is very different from the adhoc streaming from a webcam to ustream or Justin.tv. For one thing we felt that the advertising on these channels would be unacceptable to many of our potential audience. And the quality is simply not good enough. After a lot of investigations, we bought in streaming services from a Canadian company, Netromedia. Netromedia is not a portal, but instead provide a feed which can be embedded within a web site. And we have embedded Flash viewers in the ECER conference web site. We agreed to stream the keynotes from the conference. We patched the stream from the audio system in the rooms the keynotes were held, and mixed that with our video feed. The quality was on the whole extremely good. I am less convinced with the content. that is not to detract from the scholarly content of the keynote speeches themselves. I am just not sure that a 45 minute academic keynote is the best content for streaming from a  conference. Better may be to focus on more interactive sessions, in which we can involve remote participants. More reflections on this in a future blog.

But now for the next interview…

ECER has an extensive web site but has until now not ventured into the Web 2.0 field. We are supporting them with the use of social software and video to enhance the conference experience for delegates, to promote knowledge sharing between delegates from different research areas in education, to produce a multimedia record of the conference and to help those unable to attend in person to participate in at least some of the conference events.

We have already agreed and publicised a conference hash tag – #ECER2010. We have set up a twitter account – ECER_EERA and have slowly gathered 42 followers. We have a Flickr group. We have installed plug-ins to the ECER web site which is run on the Open Source Typo3 Content management system to integrate the flickr and twitter streams.

And now it is time for the live conference. We are planning three main activities this week.

Video streaming

We are streaming the opening ceremony and the four keynote sessions. Because the keynotes are being held in parallel sessions, we have set up two different streaming channels. You can access the video channels here.

Wednesday 25 August

17:45 – 18:45 (Finnish time) 18:45 – 19:45 (CET) Keynote 2 – Marie Verhoeven Marie Verhoeven is Professor at the Université catholique de Louvain. At ECER 2010, she will analyse how cultural domination through schooling process has to be rethought, in a context which combines cultural and normative pluralism, globalized international policies and normative discourses, and “post-massification” equality of opportunity policies (often articulated with educational “quasi-market” mechanisms).

Friday 27 August

13:30 – 14:30 (Finnish time) 14:30 – 15:30 (CET) – Keynote 4 – Fazal Rizvi Fazal Riszvi will discuss issues of diversity in education, and how the various transnational processes require them to be conceptualized in radically new ways The title of his lecture is “Re-thinking Issues of Diversity within the Context of an Emergent Transnationalism”.

Conference Internet radio

We will be producing three LIVE internet radio broadcasts from our radio station, Sounds of the Bazaar.. The shows will be broadcast from 1200 – 1230 Central European Time on Wednesday 25 August and Thursday 26 August and from 1100 – 1130 Central European Time on Friday 27 August (Don’t forget, if you are listening from the UK it is one hour earlier). You can access the shows by pointing to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u in your browser. This will open the LIVE radio stream in your MP3 player of choice.

Videos and iTunes U

We will be making some thirteen videos at the conference – twelve interviewing conveners from the different networks and the thirteenth a mash up of vox pops from delegates. And we are setting up an iTunes U site to access all the different outputs.

It is going to be a busy week. We hope you will be able to join us for at least part of the fun.

• romantic (ecological humanist): concerned with personal development, growth and well-being of individual academics within the organisation
• interpretive-hermeneutic: working towards new shared insights and practice through a dialectic approach of intelligent conversation
• reflective practitioner: fostering a culture of self- or mutually critical reflection on the part of colleagues in order to achieve continuous improvement

Vogel says “good practice in e-learning is context-specific and impossible to define.” She is concerned that professional development practices have been driven by institutional and technological concerns. Instead she would prefer Argyis and Schon’s (1974) approach to overcoming the divide between espoused theories or beliefs and theories in use or practice:
“Educating students under the conditions that we are suggesting requires competent teachers at the forefront of their field – teachers who are secure enough to recognize and not be threatened by the lack of consensus about competent practice.”
Vogel refers to Browne (2008) who undertook a survey of technology enhanced elearning in Higher Education in the UK. They found that where there was “less extensive use of technology-enhanced learning tools than [the] institutional norm”, this was often because of the perceived irrelevance of TEL to the learning and teaching approach.
Interestingly, where there was more extensive use than the norm, this was primarily attributed to the presence of a champion, who could represent the value of TEL to colleagues..
One of the issues related to teachers disposition appears to be that of time. As long ago as 1998,  Conole and Oliver (1998) said that the demands of technology enhanced learning on time had already been recognised for many years.
Another issue may be the way in which technology is introduced into schools and colleges. Often this is through projects. However the Jisc funded Flourish project suggested that a ‘project’ is not necessarily the best method for introducing a change on this scale. “Staff perceptions of a project mean that they are cautious and unwilling to be the test case, especially when they are taking time to document their own development. There have to be tangible and immediate benefits to engaging in this new way of working.”

References to Follow

My colleague Jenny Hughes, has recently written a chapter called ‘Introducing e-Learning – getting started’ to be published in a forthcoming e-book series. The chapter looks at practical steps to introducing e-learning from the position of a senior manager, a junior manager and classroom teacher. As ever we would be grateful for your feedback on this first draft. Does it make sense to you?.

Introducing e-learning – getting started

If you want to introduce e-learning methods into your organisation the way you go about it will be largely determined by the position you hold. We have considered how you may approach it firstly as a senior manager (e.g Head of HRD or a VET school principal) then as a middle manager (e.g a training officer or section leader) and finally as a classroom teacher or trainer.

Senior manager

Before you even consider introducing e-learning, ask yourself why you are doing it – what problem are you trying to solve with it and what do you want to achieve?  Just as important, how will you know that it has been achieved? What are your targets? Over what time period?  Change needs to be measurable.  ‘Introducing e-learning’ is just not specific enough! Do you want to install a complete learning management system including computerized student / trainee tracking, a repository of materials and course content or would you be happy if a handful of creative teachers or trainers got together and started experimenting with social software tools?

• Consult early and consult often – if you force change on people, problems normally arise.  You need to ask yourself which groups of people will be affected by your planned changes and involve them as early as possible. Check that these people agree with it, or at least understand the need for change and have a chance to decide how the change will be managed and to be involved in the planning and implementation. Use face-to-face communications wherever possible.
• Try to see the picture from the perspective of each group and ask yourself how they are likely to react. For example, older staff may feel threatened and have no interest in adopting new technologies.  The staff who teach IT often consider that e-learning is really under their remit and resent the involvement of other staff in their ‘territory’.   Another very sensitive group will be your IT technicians. They can make or break your plans by claiming they ‘cannot support’ this or that and raising all sorts of security issues and other obstacles.
• Although you may be enthusiastic about e-learning try not to be too zealous – this is not sustainable in the long term. The idea is to convey your enthusiasm and stimulate theirs rather than hard selling e-learning. If you do, people will nod their acceptance then completely disregard it thinking this is yet another of those initiatives that will go away in time. Change is usually unsettling, so the manager, logically, needs to be a settling influence not someone who wants to fire people up with his own passion thinking this will motivate them.

• Think carefully about the time frame. If you think that you need to introduce e-learning quickly, probe the reasons – is the urgency real? Will the effects of agreeing a more sensible time-frame really be more disastrous than presiding over a disastrous change? Quick change prevents proper consultation and involvement, which leads to difficulties that take time to resolve.
• Think about the scale. Are you going for a top down approach which may be standard across the institution and include a Learning Management System and a Learning Content Management System? Or are you going to stimulate small scale explorations in the classroom with a few interested teachers and try to grow e-learning organically?
• Avoid expressions like ‘mindset change’, and ‘changing people’s mindsets’ or ‘changing attitudes’, because this language often indicates a tendency towards imposed or enforced change and it implies strongly that the organization believes that its people currently have the ‘wrong’ mindset.
• Workshops, rather than mass presentations, are very useful processes to develop collective understanding, approaches, policies, methods, systems, ideas, etc.
• Staff surveys are a helpful way to repair damage and mistrust among staff – provided you allow people to complete them anonymously, and provided you publish and act on the findings.
• You cannot easily impose change – people and teams need to be empowered to find their own solutions and responses, with facilitation and support from managers. Management and leadership style and behaviour are more important than policy and sophisticated implementation  processes and. Employees need to be able to trust the organization.
• Lead by example – set up a Facebook group as part of the consultation process, use a page on the organization website to keep people up to date with planned changes, use different media to communicate with staff, make a podcast of your key messages and publish it on YouTube

John Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School has designed the following eight step model, which we think is really useful so we have included it in full.

• Increase urgency – inspire people to move, make objectives real and relevant.
• Build the guiding team – get the right people in place with the right emotional commitment, and the right mix of skills and levels.
• Get the vision right – get the team to establish a simple vision and strategy, focus on emotional and creative aspects necessary to drive service and efficiency.
• Communicate for buy-in – Involve as many people as possible, communicate the essentials, simply, and to appeal and respond to people’s needs. De-clutter communications – make technology work for you rather than against.
• Empower action – Remove obstacles, enable constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders – reward and recognise progress and achievements.
• Create short-term wins – Set aims that are easy to achieve – in bite-size chunks. Manageable numbers of initiatives. Finish current stages before starting new ones.
• Don’t let up – Foster and encourage determination and persistence – ongoing change – encourage ongoing progress reporting – highlight achieved and future milestones.
• Make change stick – Reinforce the value of successful change via recruitment, promotion, new change leaders. Weave change into culture.

Middle managers

As a middle manager, in some ways you are in the most difficult position if you want to introduce e-learning methods in your classrooms or workplace as you have to convince both those above you and below you. Convincing senior managers is usually fairly easy to start with if you present them with some concrete benefits of using e-learning in a specific context and tell them that in the first instance it will not cost anything. For example, telling management that you are going to get your first year building apprentices to set up a wiki around new materials or record their work experience on a blog and that there are no cost implications is very unthreatening whereas announcing that you are going to introduce e-learning across your department is going to raise all sorts of concerns.

The important thing is that once you have done something, share the success stories with your senior managers – get them to listen to the podcast your apprentices made or invite then to join your engineering students’ Facebook group.  This reassures them they made the right decision in allowing you to get on with it and actively engages them in the process. It is then much easier asking for extra money for a vid cam to improve on the audio podcasting than it would have been without any concrete outcomes.

A lot depends on how familiar your senior managers are with e-learning technologies and pedagogies and whether they are promoting it, indifferent or actively against the ideas.

If they are lacking in knowledge, one of your jobs is to educate them and the best way of doing this is to do some small scale stuff (such as the things suggested above) and show them the results. Make a clear, simple but well produced slide presentation explaining what you want to do and the benefits it will bring. Don’t send it to them as an email attachment – upload it to Slideshare and send them the link. In this way you are ‘training’ your managers in the use of e-learning -  don’t miss an opportunity!

If you do need extra resources, set out a clear proposal showing what is capital cost (such as hardware) and what is recurring revenue cost (such as broadband connection). Make sure you cost in EVERYTHING (see list above) – there is nothing designed to infuriate senior management as much as a proposal that is deliberately under-costed to increase its chances of approval then to find out after implementation has started there are extra costs which, if not met, waste the rest of the investment. Of course, this is true of any proposal but investment in e-learning seems particularly prone to escalating and ‘hidden’ costs.

When it comes to dealing with the people below you, the same rules apply as those set out for senior managers. To these we would add one or two specific ideas.

• Begin with a grass roots approach
• Start where you have most chance of success. – Find out who in your section or department is interested in e-learning or is confident about using ICT. Encourage and ‘grow’ these people and make sure you reward them in some way. (This could be a few hours non-contact time to develop some e-learning materials or chance to go to a training course, conference or visit. )
• Talk about the successes at staff meetings.  Most people will see e-learning as yet more work for which there is no payback – you have to motivate them in some way.
• Find a vocal group of beta testers
• Don’t set strict rules – encourage exploration and experiment
• Create opportunities for staff to look at e-learning being used effectively. This could be visits to other VET schools or training centres, (real or on-line), YouTube videos or practical training sessions – the best are those where they leave with e-learning ideas or materials or other products that they can use immediately in their classroom or work place.
• Encourage staff to join in on-line forums or open meetings about e-learning. If they are not confident to start with, it is perfectly OK to ‘lurk’ in the background occasionally. www.pontydysgu.org is a good site for finding out about on-line events for trainers

• Hold informal training sessions and encourage the use of microblogging as a back channel during training
• Constantly monitor feedback and make changes as needed
• Communicate the stories behind e-learning e.g How did social software start? What made Twitter happen? Will Facebook survive?

Teachers / trainers

If you are an individual teacher or trainer it can be very daunting trying to introduce e-learning into your teaching if you are working in an organisation where there is no experience or culture of e-learning. You cannot change this easily from your position. The best way of influencing things is to just try something out in your own classroom. You are definitely better starting off with some simple web 2.0 based activities as these have no cost implications. Choose this activity carefully – think of any objections that could be raised, however ridiculous. For example –

A Facebook group? – Facebook is banned or even firewalled because staff and trainees waste too much time on it.

A skype video interview between a group of apprentices and a skilled craftsman? – IT support section will not let you access Skype, (which uses a different port, which they will have closed and will not open for ‘security reasons’)

Sharing bookmarks using del.icio.us ? – the students will use it to share porn sites.

An audio podcast may be a good start if you have enough computers with built in mics and speakers or access to a mic and a recording device like an i-pod. Setting up a group wiki around a particular theme is also difficult to object to. Another possibility is to get trainees blogging (For detailed instructions on how to do all this, look at the Taccle handbook)

If you are lucky, you may find that your managers are just glad that someone is interested and give you the freedom to operate. There are very few who will actively prevent you as long as it does not cost them time or money, although you may find that some other staff have a negative attitude.

From this base you can gradually build up a small informal group of like-minded teachers to share ideas or swap materials.  A group of teachers will also have more influence. Make sure any positive outcomes are disseminated, preferably show casing trainees’ work.

One good way of doing this is to print out a list of guest log-ins and passwords to anything you are working on (e.g a wiki) or the url to web pages where your trainees are publishing work. Add a brief explanation and stick it on the wall as well as routinely sending it by email to other staff in your section ‘for information’. This has the double benefit of keeping what you are doing transparent and also makes some people curious enough to click on the hyperlink.

Invite other teachers along to your classroom when you know you will be using e-learning or invite them to drop in to your group meetings.

You will also need to introduce the idea of e-learning to your trainees.  Although many of the younger students will need no convincing, it can be difficult with older workers who may have a very fixed idea of what constitutes ‘training’ or ‘learning’.  Make sure that the first time you introduce a new application to a group that you allow enough time to explain how the technology works and time for them to familiarize themselves with it using a ‘test’ example before you start. For example…”let’s all try setting up a wiki about things to do with Christmas  / the World Cup / the best pubs in …” before you get onto the serious stuff.

I have been particularly interested in some of the work on digital literacies. The notion of digital literacies has been around for some time, but, at least in an Anglo Saxon context, has tended to be dominated by narrow skill set definitions. Such thinking has not gone away - Learn Direct offer a entry level Digital Literacy certificate based on

• Computer Basics
• The Internet and World Wide Web
• Productivity Programmes
• Computer Security and Privacy
• Digital Lifestyles

And Microsoft’s First Course Toward Digital Literacy claims to  teach absolute beginners to computing about what a valuable tool computers can be in society today, and the basics of using the mouse and the keyboard. The interactive, hands-on lessons will help novices feel comfortable manipulating the mouse and typing on the keyboard (is this what Bill Gates is referring to when he says the Internet will displace the traditional University in 5 years).

But at the same time there has been some more advanced thinking on the meaning of digital literacy, based in part on new understandings of the mulitmodality affordances of Web 2.0 and in part on research into the way young people are using the web.  There is growing evidence that young people have difficulties in interpreting and making judgements and meanings about online materials, be they text, hypertext or multi media. A third influence on this wok is the expanded idea of the importance of design as a means of communication in the wider social environment of Web 2.0.

The wider understandings of Digital Literacies is leading in terms to a move away from narrowly defined skills training towards an exploration of pedagogies in teaching and learning using technologies. I am particularly interested in a pedagogic model developed by the New London Group as long ago as 2000 and represented in the UK Teaching and Learning Programme’s recent publication entitled Digital Literacies (although sometimes a little dense this is well worth reading). The New London Group put forward four components of pedagogy:

• Situated Practice, which draws on the experience of meaning-making in everyday life, the public realm and workplaces;
• Overt Instruction, through which students develop an explicit metalanguage of design;
• Critical Framing, which interprets the social context and purpose of Designs of meaning; and
• Transformed Practice, in which students, as meaning -makers, become designers of social futures.

(Cope and Kalantzis, 2000, p. 7)

What is missing from this model is a social dimension around collaboration. But the model is strong in  its focus on the new social realities engendered by technologies. It is the need to be able to understand and critique those social realities which should inform the development of new pedagogies.

Here are some of the issues I am looking at:

• Teacher training and continuing professional development
• eLearning and pedagogic approaches to the use of technology for learning
• The development and use of social software and web 2.0 technologies and its impact on education and learning
• Future technologies and trends and their possible impact within education

Specific issues to be examined may include (but will not be limited to):

• Pedagogic theories of use of technologies for learning and implications
• Effective Pedagogic practices of use of technologies for learning and implications
• Effective Practices in different sectors / subject areas
• Use of technology for initial training of teachers and CPD
• Impact of technologies on pedagogy in practice
• Digital literacies and digital identities for teachers
• Present qualifications for teachers and approaches to pedagogy and use of technology for learning
• Effective practices in initial teacher training and CPD in use of technology for learning
• e-Assessment and evaluation

I would be very grateful for any references, reports or other materials you think I should include in such a review. I would be particularly grateful for references to studies or reports on the training of teachers in other countries than the UK. All help will be gratefully acknowledged and in due course I will publish the results of the review on the Pontydysgu web site.

I am also very dubious about his view on the evolution of online learning environments. George says:

Over the last eight years, the market has experience enormous change (web 2.0, virtual worlds, social media, networked learning). But many things have settled in the process. Some universities are beginning to focus on a big-picture view of technology: making learning resources available in multimedia, integrating technology from design to delivery, using mobile technologies, and increased focus on network pedagogy. Blackboard (and LMS’ in general) have been able to present the message that “you need an LMS to do blended and online learning”.

To counter this view, the edupunk/DIY approach to learning has produced an emphasis on personal learning environments and networks. To date, this movement has generated a following from a small passionate group of educators, but has not really made much of an impact on traditional education. I don’t suspect it will until, sadly, it can be commoditized and scaled to fit into existing systemic models of education. Perhaps Downes’ Plearn research project, or OU’s SocialLearn project will prove me wrong (I really hope they do!!). For the purposes of this post, however, the brave new world of online learning will be dominated by LMS like Moodle, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and regional players like Fronter.

I have never seen edupunk being a movement which would move in and takeover the traditional education system. What edupunk does provide is an alternative to traditional pedagogy as well as showing there are other routes than commercialisation of education through technology. I don’t expect any institutional manager to announce a new policy based on edupunk? But what we are seeing is increasing numbers of teachers using social software for tecahing and learning. The impact of that is far harder to measure than the number of VLEs adopted by different educational institutions. It will also probably have a far more profound impact of tecahing and learning and pedagogic approaches to using technology.

The second impact of PLEs, edupunk and social software is in the developing ideas and practice around Open Learning. Knowledge and learning is escaping from the institution. And long term that will be the greatest impact of all.

Unable to get out often , my father misses particularly being able to read.  And this is where assistive technologies should come in. Surely in this MP3 driven world of connectivity he should be able to find a something to read him the football news in the morning or read a historical novel. Except no – it would seem.

The present range of assistive technologies seem to assume the ability to operate a computer. Furthermore few devices are designed for those with visual difficulties. In fact my fathers favorite gadget is a watch with two buttons to press for an audio version of the date and the time. He does get some audio books on CD ROM from a local charity. But he has no choice of what book they give him. And although the lcoal library also has CDROMs for audio books, he is unable to see to select them (and my mother unable to walk to select them!).

I know the EU is funding a research programme strand on assistive technologies. I am going to be looking with some interest in what they are actually producing. Because it seems to me that in the commercial world, developers and manufacturers are more interested in maximising their profits on the mass market, than in designing for those with disabilities.

NB I would be very grateful for any ideas you might have on this.

Some more quick notes on pedagogy – an issue that is somewhat obsessing me at the moment.

One of the issue which is constantly arising is that of reflection. Reflection is seen by many as a powerful tool for learning and especially for metacognition. Yet reflection is seen as problematic. As teachers we cannot force learners to reflect. And many teachers – especially in the upper school systems and in universities complain that students do not want to reflect – they want just to be told what they have to learn to pass their exams.

I have taught in many sectors (or domains) in the education system. I have worked as a detached youth worker, in adult education, as  as a teacher trainer and as a trainer for continuing educational development. I have also (occasionally) taught undergraduate students in university. And what strikes me is  very different approaches to reflection and to pedagogy in those different domains.

We seldom talked about reflection when I was working as a youth worker or  trainer. We often talked about reflection when i worked as a university teacher. Yet despite this, there were far higher levels of refection in training courses I have run than on university courses I have taught on. Why?

University courses are geared around a subject based curriculum. Essentially we are involved in dividing up that curriculum into chunks and providing lectures, seminars and assessed assignments to ensure the curriculum is fully covered in a semester or module.

In contrast trainers – be it in professional development or in youth work have a very different starting point and pedagogic focus. Essentially trainers are concerned above all with designing learning. This includes

• A focus on the needs of the learners, rather than the demands of a syllabus
• The development of aims and objectives for learner achievement
• The design of the learning environment
• The design of learning activities
• Formative assessment for learners to measure their own (both individual and collective) progress
• Mechanisms for evaluation, feedback and iterative programme development

In terms of activities we were often looking for active and authentic learning activities – activities designed to help learners develop their own ideas. And we would build in methods for discussion and exchange of ideas. Programme planning and design used to take much longer – in professional development we had a rule of thumb which said two days development time for each days delivery. Of course this is resource intensive. But would a change to focus on the needs of the learners and to design authentic learning activities not facilitate the kind of reflective learning to which we aspire. That might mean tearing up rigid curricula. It might mean developing new learning environments outside a classroom. It might mean moving away from individual assessment. But it might be worth it.

I also suspect that one of the drivers of such a debate is the increasing pressures on education – on the one hand cutbacks in funding, on the other hand increasing pressure for higher levels of education and for lifelong learning.

Having said that it is perfectly legitimate to advocate open educational resources as improving existing institutional provision. But even at that level, OERs challenge ideas around the ownership of knowledge and the use of that knowledge.

It is also striking that we are developing a linked set of ideas – Open Educational Resources, Personal Learning Environments, Personal Learning Networks. I share some of Richard Hill’s concerns over individualisation. At the end of the day learning is a social process. And indeed there are risks, if PLEs and PLNs are merely seen as different ways of pursuing learning within educational institutions. It is striking that the right wing English education minister, Michael Grove, has been promoting private profit driven universities as a means of increasing the use of distance learning and educational technology. However, there is an alternative discourse within the PLE / PLN development looking to promote social and community based learning to reach outside the educational institutions, very much as posed by Illich in his ground breaking treatise on deschooling society.

Whilst I agree with Terry Wassall in placing the act of tecahing and learning at the centre of debates over critical pedagogy, I also think that the widening contexts and domains of learning also could play a key role in such a critique. It has been the very narrowing down of what has been seen as legitimate in terms of learning practice and domains that has led to the hierarchical systems of education and knowledge that we see today and to the devaluing of both certain forms of learning – such as vocational education – and the disregarding of different learning domains – especially the workplace and community.

In that respect, a critical pedagogy needs to reach back and link with older traditions of workers self education as well as embrace the potentials of technology/

To be continued……..

Anuraj has recently returned to India where his university term starts next week. he has just sent us this account of his time in Pontydysgu.

“As this being my first blogpost at Pontydysgu blogs, here is my introduction:

I am Anuraj Dadhich, an undergraduate student of Interaction Design at Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India.

Three months ago, after the completion of the sixth semester I was quite lucky to get this opportunity of being an intern at Pontydysgu during my summer holidays. The thought of getting involved with the European working culture for the first time was exciting but I was quite nervous too because as this also being a short term internship (like the previous one at Impelsys, Bangalore) I wanted to give and get the maximum out of it. Fortunately, I can say that what I got in these three months was much more than I expected. However, in the terms of “giving”, I cant say anything right now as it isn’t over yet

The first day of internship, was nothing less than a disaster for both of us (me and Graham). He came up with few of his brilliant ideas and I explained my previous works and experiences and that is funny but both were certainly different from each other. I was a downfall but didn’t last very long.

So, I decided to get myself acquainted with Pontydysgu and its work environment (which was so friendly, I felt like being in a family) and then tried to get myself adjust somewhere in it. This being in process, me and Graham just talked for hours about each other backgrounds, experiences and new ideas and it didn’t take much time to realise that my encounter with Pontydysgu was not a bad idea at all. Ask Graham about his mind turnouts but here are mine :

Since the last couple of years, I have been involved in various projects/internships/workshops which gave me a platform to apply my learnings in different environments/applications. So, my mind being constricted to that was expecting a similar internship this time also. But although this as a design intern and me definitely working as an interaction designer, was a different and spectacular one. This intern, makes me realise that you should never constrict yourself to something very specific because you never know what interests you the most and what you are best at until you experience it. Every experience adds something to every human and this is what I realise can be called as ‘learning’ and everyone does that either formally or informally.

I like internships because nobody here runs for grades, marks or impressing the professors. every task comes with learning and outcomes. And I am proud to say that it happened here too. I started working on new type of projects, new softwares, new applications and all that in this new but absolutely friendly work environment of Pontydysgu.
Morover, the world cup football and the radio set fixation for Barcelona conference was fun!!!

I went to Oslo, Norway for a Euronet-PBL conference, the purpose of my visit was to get more and more familiar with the project, project partners and to get some media (video interviews, photographs etc.) for the web presence of the project. My next trip was to Zurich to attend the sonisphere festival (\m/ Metallica \m/ ) but it was a nasty one : Two days, soaked in rain, standing in knee deep mud while witnessing the metal gods of all time.

With all this Fun & Work, 3 months flew like 3 days and when I look back now I see a perfect learning period (both formally & informally). With my special thanks to Graham and Jo I end this by saying this undoubtedly that these days were the best days of my life (the last ones specially) and I would definitely like to be involved with Pontydysgu in the future.”

I have previously written in Wales Wide Web about the advantages of the apprenticeship system in Germany as providing high skills and socially prestigious training for young people. Indeed over 50 per cent of school leavers in Germany progress through the apprenticeship system, spending part of their time in companies and part in vocational schools.

In recent years the system has been under pressure due to a shortage of training places, but recent figures suggest this is changing. In Hamburg and Munich there are now surplus apprenticeship training places, in Bremen there is about a balance between places being offered by companies and young people seeking apprenticeship places.

However, attention is now turning to the quality of the training on offer. And Marius Fischer, an apprentice in the logistics industry, was fairly scathing. Apprentices, he said were just given menial work to do, referring to one period of three weeks spent scanning documents into a computer. The so called company training was boring with few learning opportunities. He rarely saw a trainer. Apprentices, he said, were just being treated as cheap labour. “This work is so stupid, a chimpanzee could learn to do it”, he said. A further complaint was that apprentices were not given sufficient experience in different areas of the company to understand the entire social and economic process.

Although there has been some attention paid to quality of training, in Germany and in the European Union, little attention has been paid to the quality of the teaching and learning process. Work based learning can be a powerful form of learning. However, for this to happen it requires the work place to be designed for learning with challenging work and learning tasks. And although managers may play an important role in that workplace and word process design, possibly more important is the role of trainers. A series of research studies have indicated that more and more people are taking some responsibility for training as part of their job. But despite this, and despite a number of well sounding policy initiatives,  little attention has been paid to the training of trainers. Whilst the subject of teacher training is a high priority, there almost seems an assumption that skilled workers can automatically provide training.

Of course Marius Fischer’s experience does not reflect apprenticeship training as a whole in Germany. But is is a reminder of the importance of teaching and learning processes for young people and that the development of rich learning processes cannot be left to chance be it in the school or in the workplace.

To these initiatives can be added the launch of JISC OER Infokit (interestingly developed on a PBWorks wiki site) aiming to explore a range of considerations from specific technical issues to barriers and enablers to institutional adoption. They say “This infoKit aims to both inform and explain OERs and the issues surrounding them for managers, academics and those in learning support. It is aimed at senior managers, learning technologists, technical staff and educators with an interest in releasing OERs to the educational community.”

Stephen Downes quotes the Brazil Green Paper saying: “Education policy and projects that combine infrastructure investment with a coherent ‘network’ approach to content are the most likely to have significant positive impact and realize the goals of the policy. The ability of the Internet to create radical increases in innovation is not an accident – but it is also not guaranteed to happen simply through putting computers and courses onto the network. This ‘generative’ effect of networks comes from the combination of open technologies, software platforms that allow creative programming, the right to make creative and experimental re-use of content, and the widespread democratization of the skills and tools required to exercise all of those rights.”

The issue of democratisation is taken up in an excellent blog post entitled “Open Education: the need for critique” by Richard Hall. Richard says ” democratic practices in education are critical in enhancing our broader socio-educational life, and underpin radical re-conceptualisations of educational practice, for example mass intellectuality, a pedagogy of excess and student-as-producer.” He goes on to say: “To use the term learning revolution demands a critique of the political economics of education, and the social relations that exist therein. This cannot be done in terms of OERs without an engagement with critical pedagogy.”

Richard points to risks in present discussions about PLEs, OERs and informal learning.

That the role/importance of individual rather than social empowerment is laid bare, and that within a libertarian educational structure, the focus becomes techno-determinist. The risk here is that, accepting the position of others in meaningful, socially-constructed tasks, technology is the driver for individual emancipation [although we rarely ask “emancipation for or from what?”]. Moreover, we believe that without constant innovation in technology and technological practices we cannot emancipate/empower ever more diverse groups of learners.

That we deliver practices that we claim are radical, but which simply replicate or re-produce a dominant political economy, in-line with the ideology of accepted business models. So that which we claim as innovatory becomes subservient to a dominant mode of production and merely enables institutions to have power-over our products and labour, rather than it being a shared project [witness the desire for HE to become more business-like].

That we fetishise the outcomes/products of our labour as a form of currency. This is especially true in the case of open educations resources, which risk being disconnected from a critique of open education or critical pedagogy, and PLEs which risk being disconnected from a critique of their relationship to our wider social relations.

That we fetishise the learner as an autonomous agent, able to engage in an environment, using specific tools and interacting with specific OERs, so that she becomes an economic actor, rather than seeing her engagement as socially emergent and negotiated.

He puts forward a number of questions around iopen education and OERs.

How do we prioritise engagement with the broader, open context of learning and education, with trusted peers? How do we raise our own literacy around openness, in order to legitimise sharing as social practice and as social process, and not as a response to a target of OER-production-as-SMART-objective?

Is the production of OERs a means of furthering control over our means of production and our labour? Is there a risk that the alleged transparency of production of OERs is used to further control and power-over, for example, teachers and teaching by impacting contracts of employment?

Though education, how do we enable the types of participatory engagement and re-production of groups like the Autonomous Geographies Collective or Trapese, where the production of OERs is a secondary outcome to the re-fashioning of social relationships that it enables? By so doing, we might just enable groups to engage with the activity-areas that Harvey highlights as a process of production, rather than fetishising the production of things.

How do we resist the increasing discourse of cost-effectiveness, monetisation, economic value, efficiency that afflicts our discussion of open education? How do we move the argument around sustainability and open education away from a focus on economic value? Too often our discussion of open education is reduced to a discussion of OERs and this, in turn, is reduced to a discourse of cost and consumption. As a result, our role in education is commodified and objectified.

Do we ask who is margnalised in the production of OERs or in open education? Are non-Western cultures engaging in open education and the production of OERs through the languages of colonialism or by focusing on native socio-cultural forms? At what point do OERs and open education become part of a post-colonial discourse focused upon new markets?

How do we utilise OERs to open-up trans-disciplinary approaches to global crises, like peak oil and climate change? How do we enable the emerging array of open subject resources to be utilised across boundaries (be they personal, subject, programme, course, institutional or national), in order to challenge sites of power in the University and beyond? These resources enable ways of challenging hegemonic, mental conceptions of the world and framing new social relations. This requires curriculum leadership. These crises require socio-educational leadership.

These questions challenge us to reconceptualise what we mean by open education. More than that they force us to start exploring a critical pedagogy and what that implies in terms of meanings and our actions as educators and educational researchers and developers I hope Richards blog post gets the attention from the community it deserves. I will be trying to answer some of the questions on this blog in the next few days.

“Cumulatively we can draw these “Learner-Generated Contexts” points together to conceptualise a new, adaptive model of the relationships between informal, non-formal and formal learning

1. In an era of social networks where users have both the tools and the experience to self-organise, and with learning being a social process, the informal dimension of learning is better defined as that domain within the learning process where people organise themselves, either to meet self-determined goals or to meet the pre-determined goals of an institution; people are how we scaffold the organisation of learning

2. In an era where an ever greater amount of learning content is on offer and new ways of providing learning resources, as objects, tools and templates, are made available then the non-formal dimension of learning could be defined as those resources used for learning; resources are how we scaffold the process of learning

3. In an era where traditional learning is being subverted by new forms of collaboration and knowledge construction, crowd-sourcing wikipedia, participatory science, then formal learning could be defined as providing reliable sources of accreditation; institutions are how we scaffold the accreditation of learning.”

One obvious question is what do we want to achieve? Basically we have three aims. One is to enhance the confernce experience for those attending. ECER is run by some 27 or so networks and with so many attending, it can be difficult to keep in touch with everything going on – or even to just find old friends. We hope the use of technology will help get people together, find old and new friends and allow discussion of ideas – before, during and after the conference. Secondly we hope to start to open the conference outwards – to involve those not able to attend face to face and to enhance connections with the wider communities of education research. And thirdly we are trying to build a small history of the conference – not just through papers – but through recording people’s reflections of their experiences and learning.

Now down to the technology – what are we doing?

Firstly we have agreed a hashtag – #ECER2010 and are encouraging delegates to use the hashtag.

We have set a twitter account – EERA_ECER – and are sending out regular tweets (followers very welcome). We have also added a plug in to the ECER web site to accumulate our tweets – http://www.eera-ecer.eu/ecer/ecer2010/twitter-news/?no_cache=1

We have also set up an ECER2010 group on Flickr and are asking delegates to add their photos to that group. Just go to http://www.flickr.com/groups/ecer2010/ and join the group.

We are planning to stream a number of the keynote sessions – more details soon.

We will be making short videos with twelve of the different network conveners as well as vox pops with conference delegates.

And finally, we will be broadcasting 3 special issues of the Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE internet radio programme from 1300 – 1330 Finnish time (12-12.30 Central European time) on 25, 26 and 27 August. Point your browser at http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u and this will open the LIVE radio stream in your MP3 player of choice. You can also send us your questions and comments by Twitter using the #ECER2010 hashtag. And to follow Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE events throughout the summer join the SoB Facebook group.

So this is our idea for the European Conference on Educational Research Amplified. But what have we left out? What else could we do? All ideas very welcome.

What is linked data?

The Web enables us to link related documents (from linkeddata.org). Similarly it enables us to link related data. The term Linked Data refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. Key technologies that support Linked Data are URIs (a generic means to identify entities or concepts in the world), HTTP (a simple yet universal mechanism for retrieving resources, or descriptions of resources), and RDF (a generic graph-based data model with which to structure and link data that describes things in the world).(Tom Heath, including excerpts from Bizer, Heath and Berners-Lee (in press))

What is the relationship between Linked Data and the Semantic Web?

Opinions on this topic differ somewhat, however a widely held view is that the Semantic Web is made up of Linked Data; i.e. the Semantic Web is the whole, while Linked Data is the parts. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web and the person credited with coining the terms Semantic Web and Linked Data has frequently described Linked Data as “the Semantic Web done right.”

Using Linked data with Careers PAs in the UK

Though the MATURE project we have undertaken extensive research and consultation with PAs in different Connexions companies including in England and Wales around the use of Labour Market Information in Careers Advice, Information and Guidance. Work undertaken through the project has aimed to allow research and easy access to documentation around different careers including LMI. We are also aware that all LMI requires interpretation – s stage of knowledge maturing – and one aim has been to allow easy forms of interpretation though tagging etc. A second aim has been to allow the development of an organisational knowledge base through sharing the results of LMI research. LMI is based on various data, collected by different government agencies and by for example the sector skills councils. In the past access to this data has been restricted. Additionally it requires considerable knowledge and skills to be able to manipulate and interpret large data sets. Inevitably much of the interpetation is over generalised and is frequently out of date.

Open Data

In autumn of 2009, a new web site was launched in the UK based on an initiative by Tim Berners Lee and Nick Shadbolt. Data.gov.uk seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data. As highlighted by the Power of Information Taskforce, this means it needs to be:

• easy to find;
• easy to license; and
• easy to re-use.

The aim is to publish government data as RDF – enabling data to be linked together. The web site says their approach is based on:

• Working with the web;
• Keeping things simple: we aim to make the smallest possible changes that will make the web work better;
• Working with the grain: we are not looking to rebuild the world. We appreciate that some things take time; others can be done relatively quickly. Everything has it’s own time and pace;
• Using open standards, open source and open data: these are the core elements of a modular, sustainable system; and
• Building communities, and working with and through them (both inside government and outside).

The new UK government has committed itself to backing this initiative and increasingly local government organisations are providing open access to data. Many of the key data sets for LMI are available through the data.gov.uk site including time series data on employment in different occupations, average earnings, job centre vacancies (at fine grained local office level and over a 10 year time series), qualifications, graduate destinations etc. along with more generalised but critical data such as post codes. All data can be queried in real time through a SPARQL interface.

Thus there is considerable potential to run queries and provide linked data providing valuable Labour Market and Careers information.

For instance:

A post code or location based query around a particular occupation could reveal:

• the average pay for that job
• job centre vacancies in that job over the past at a local level

By querying external databases this could be extended to include:

• iCould videos about that career (there are something like 1000 high quality videos available)
• Job description along with required qualifications

Where xcri course information data is available the app could provide information on local courses related to that career (Note – xcri data standard compliance is patchy in the UK).

Maturing Knowledge – the role of the PA

Whilst this system would be a great advance on anything presently available, it is not perfect. LMI data still requires interpretation. For instance job centre data has a known bias towards public sector employment, lower paid jobs and short term employment. The search only covers past data and may not reveal longer term labour market trends. Thus ideally following such a search the PA would be able to add brief notes before saving the search. These overall results could then be packaged to sent to a client as well as stored within the organisational system. To use the new information and knowledge sources being made available through the Careers Project requires new interpretation skills on behalf of the PAs. Thus the development of a linked data app would also be accompanied by the development of the TEBO which aims to provide informal learning for PAs around using LMI

Visualisations

Although a early version of the system might well be text based, it would enhance data interpretation to provide visualisations of the data.It may be possible to do this dynamically using for instance APIs to the IBM Open Source Many Eyes application.