I am more and more interested in the different ways people are using the web to tell stories. Jen Hughes is not a regular blogger although her guest spots on this blog are always great. But she is becoming a prolific creator of cartoons and I love the way she weaves different story themes together. This is her latest offering (for non rugby playing country readers the annual Wales against England rugby match is the high spot of the Welsh cultural scene).

I have always been interested in the potential of work based learning. Although much of what I have written about is informal learning, formal work based learning programmes also seem to me to be important. Apprenticeship is probably the largest such organised form of work based learning. And, if speakers at last weeks INAP conference in Vienna are to be believed, apprenticeship programmes seem alive and kicking. Indeed, some countries like Italy, have witnessed a dramatic increase in apprentice numbers in the last five years.That is not to say that apprenticeship training is without problems – especially in those countries which have developed mass university education, like the UK, apprenticeship lacks prestige. Drop out rates are sometimes alarmingly high. Quality of apprenticeships may vary. School or workshop based training may lack authenticity.Apprenticeship programmes are probably strongest in the German speaking countries. In Germany and Switzerland some two thirds of all young people embark on apprenticeship training, in Austria around 40 per cent do so. In Germany and Switzerland occupations prepared for by apprenticeship cover all economicsectors i.e. in craft, industry and trade, liberal professions, and services. In Austria, apprenticeship prepares predominantly for artisan-type occupations and full-time higher level vocational colleges prepare for associate professional and technical occupations. Apprenticeship in the German-speaking dual-system countries is structured by the concept of Beruf and apprenticeship training can only be provided in a recognized occupation. The Beruf or professional occupation is defined by a coherent set of skills that combine together to form both an occupational and a social identity (Steedman, 2005).A major threat to the future of the apprenticeship programmes -and one that is not limited to the German speaking countries is a lack of training places. Moral responsibility to provide training opportunties is no longer sufficient motivation for employers who are concerned at the cost of training. Of course one answer coudl be large state subsidies but this seems hardly realistic.On my way back from Vienna I talked to Lars Heinemann from the University of Bremen who is working on a project called IBB 2010. Lars has just completed a major study into apprenticeship (I will provide link as soon as I have one). Essentially, the IBB project has developed a complex statistical tools for looking at the cost and quality of apprenticeship. Initial results suggest vast differences in the cost. Cost is far lower in the craft trades. The major variable appears to be whether training takes place in a training workshop or directly in the workplace. Where training takes place in the workplace, apprentices contribute more to the production process (or services) and thus the overall cost to the employer is lower. Now the project is looking at what practices could be transferred – both to improve quality and to reduce costs.I think this is important work. Only last week I lambasted UK prime minister Browns announcement that Mac Donalds amongst others are to become awarding bodies for qualifications gained in their workplaces. the reason I guess for this is to address precisely the same problem that faces the German speaking countries – a lack of willingness on the part of employers to provide training. But I think the German answer sounds potentially much more appealing in maintaining broader training programmes and refusing to let companies take over the curriculum.

An interesting article from the Guardian newspaper on teachers in the UK.

“Around 17,000 “substandard” teachers are struggling in classrooms and failing to inspire their pupils, according to the head of the body responsible for upholding teaching standards.

Middle-aged male teachers are a particular worry, and teachers need retraining throughout their careers to prevent them becoming disaffected, Keith Bartley, head of the General Teaching Council for England, said.

……. Bartley said: “It is not unreasonable to assume that in a workforce of half a million there is a proportion that is probably around that 17,000 that are in practice substandard.

“If we want to make more of a difference in more classrooms it’s probably not the incompetent teachers that are the problem. It’s teachers who are struggling with their classrooms day-in day-out – part of that is behaviour management in increasingly difficult classrooms.”
It seems top me a bit odd and not particularly helpful to come up with such a precise figure as 17000 and then justify that by saying it is not an unreasonable assumption. Neither am I sure that the emotive language of failing teachers is the best way to approach a discourse over what more can and should be done to support the practice of teachers. The most likely result of such an approach will be to stigmatise anyone seeking more support. However discussion with teachers and more particularly with trainee teachers suggest there are issues which need addressing. Firstly I am unconvinced that there is sufficient emphasis on applied practice – including classroom management within the teacher training curriculum, at least in the UK. And whilst trainee teachers do undertake placements in schools as well as serve a probationary year, part of which is supposed to include further ,earning with support, anecdotal evidence suggest that the quality of such support is at best highly variable. Neither am I convinced that we have sufficient research on what exactly comprises good practice in the field.

The second point is that all teachers – not only those deemed to be ‘failing’ should have access and time for continuing professional development. Once more form limited knowledge of UK practice, what on-going staff development is available seems all too often to be either concerned with overall school management or with the introduction of of new schemes, assessment programmes etc. once more the assumption is that classroom practice and classroom management will will take care of itself.

Existing progression routes are not helpful. Although Scotland has introduced a Chartered Teacher scheme to reward experienced practitioners, in England and in wales, promotion is through becoming managers outside the classroom.

The problem with statements like Bartley’s – and the inevitable popular press reaction – is that it hinders a proper discussion of any of these issues

Around the start of January it has become traditional for educational bloggers to make their predictions on what is going to happen in the world of education technology in the forthcoming year. Predictably, I am late. But better late than never, as the saying goes.

And here is my prediction. 2008 will be the year of web based groupware. Nothing much revolutionary about that. The first on-line application I ever used was FirstClass – jointly hosted by the UK Open University and the BBC in th early days of the web. The interface was not great and of course it was not very fast. But it sort of worked. You could join groups, exchange messages in groups and uplaod files. Pretty basic but that is all most people wanted to do.

I used FirstClass until a couple of years ago. I even got quite smart in administration. After changing hands every couple of years FirstClass seemed to slowly fade, not helped by the refusal to release the code and insisting developers could only work in some horrible thing called RAD.

Of course FirstClass or FC as us aficionados used to call it was not the only groupware product. There were and still are many very good products out there.

But in the last few years groupware has been eclipsed int eh education field by powerful CMS systems, by LMS and VLEs and more lately by social networking platforms. This, I predict, is all about to change. Why?

1. Groupware is scalable. Not so much scaling up, but scaling down. It works just as well for 5 people as it does for 50. Social networking sowfatre does not scale well – especially downwards. It needs considerable activity to show any gain.
2. Groupware doesn’t nag – you do not get endless status upgrades. It shuts out the ‘noise’ of the web.
3. Groupware does the things many people want to do in their work – share files, provide a small repository, share messages with a limited group of people.
4. Google and yahoo have been quietly developing excellent, free easy to manage groupware products.

Lest give you a few examples. I have been struggling for years to get projects to collectively share developmental activity through various CMS and more latterly WordPress based platforms. But it is very hard. What they usually do is send me things which I have to put up. And if none of the group are used to blogging it is very difficult to persuade them to participate in a group blog. But people ‘get’ groupware. they can see the value of it and it is very easy to use. It makes their lives easier, rather than being another thing to learn about. In the last three months nearly every new project I have participated in has set up an group on Yahoo or Google.

Another example – a friend and colleague of mine – John Pallister who is a teacher in a UK school worked for a long time in developing a great blog on his experiences in implementing e-Portfolios. But try as he might he got very little traffic, still less feedback. Now he has started a group on Google called e-Portfolios and PLTs (PLT stands for Personal Learning and Thinking Skills). John says:

“I don’t know whether this will work, but I have watched and contributed to many online discussions about both skills and ePortfolios – most discussions dried up very quickly and did not manage to engage the people who were prepared to throw their ideas into the thinking-pot. Can Google Groups as a vehicle help?

I have set the group up with minimal admin and now hope to sit back and enjoy reading about your experiences, thinking and ideas about how ePortfolios can support the development of Personal Learning and Thinking Skills).”

There have been so good posts to the group, though I think John is a little disappointed there are not more active participants. But, as I have written before, lurking is a great way to learn. Even with limited active participants, groups can be a powerful means of mutual learning. And groups – just as face to face – tend to have peaks and troughs in activity, quietening down and then re-emerging for particular purposes at particular times. Groupware is ideal for supporting such forms of discourse and exchange. So stick in there, John.

So that is it. 2008 – the year of groupware.

We always knew it would take a little time to build the Pontydysgu site. But it is always not far from our mind. And occasionally we move new content live. Today is a working day on the site. We have moved the Services section live – although at the moment the only part with content is courses. Please check it out because we enjoy teaching and running workshops.

Now we are off to lunch. But after lunch we will try to get the research section working with downloadable publications.

Cristina – stand by your rss reader 🙂

Community Capacity Building

• Social Auditing
• Planning and carrying out a Community Audit
• Community Advocacy
• Setting up a Community Group
• Effective Meetings (several modules – Chairing, Minute taking, Participating in etc…)
• Action Planning for Community Groups
• Working in Partnership
• Working with Groups
• Working with the Media
• Applying for Grant Aid
• Evaluating Community Projects and Social Enterprises
• Equal Opportunities and Diversity
• Mentoring
• Tools for community capacity building

Soft Skills Training

• Performance Appraisal
• Logical Framework Analysis
• Customer Care
• Leadership & Management
• Delegation
• Teambuilding
• Time Management
• Evaluation Skills
• Quality Systems
• Benchmarking
• Evaluation skills

Counselling Skills

• Introduction to Counselling (accredited programme)
• Stage II (WJEC) Counselling
• Transactional Analysis
• T.A for Managers
• Introduction to Gestalt Counselling

Teaching and Learning Skills

• Training the trainers
• Evaluating teaching and learning
• Reflection and self evaluation
• Part –time teachers (accredited course)
• Facilitating Groups
• Teaching and Learning Methods (several modules)
• Coaching and Mentoring
• Facilitating Action Learning Sets

Technology Enhanced Learning

• Training trainers in Technology Enhanced Learning
• Developing and implementing e-Portfolios
• Training teachers and trainers for the use of e-Portfolios
• Podcasting
• Web 2.0 and learning
• Personal Learning Environments

Agggh – this is just what I feared. For some time I have been convinced we are at a turning point in our development of education and training systems and provision. I won’t go into all the reasons here – suffice to say that I believe education is intrinsically toed up in societal development – including economic development – and that our present education systems are based on the needs and forms of the first industrial revolutions and have failed to change to reflect the profound changes in society resulting from the digital revolution.

That systems will change and change dramatically is without doubt in my opinion. The direction of such change is less clear. I believe there is a big danger that systems will become privatized with state provision becoming a second class option. Furthermore, education is deeply tied up with societal values. Companies will not usually reflect those values in their totality.

I have no problem with MacDonald’s offering training programmes. Far from it. I do have two issues. One – why the hype? Why is the Prime Minister announcing new apprenticeship programmes by a few major companies. The rub is in the detail. MacDonald’s and other organisations will now be able to accredit their own programmes. They will become private examination boards. It could be argued that a number of the examination boards in the UK are effectively private organisations. But their purpose is to accredit learning. MacDonald’s primary purpose is to make p-rofit for shareholders by selling hamburgers.

Perhaps I am being paranoid, but I fear the reason that prime minister brown has announced these new programme sis that this represent another large shift towards privatising education and training in the UK.

From the Guardian: “The prime minister has defended the accreditation of in-company qualifications after it was announced that staff at McDonald’s could gain the equivalent of an A-level in burger bar management.

The fast food giant, Network Rail and the airline Flybe are the first three companies to win government approval to become an exam board.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has approved a pilot “basic shift manager” course, which will train staff in everything they need to run a McDonald’s outlet, from marketing to human resources and customer service skills.

The budget airline Flybe will start piloting their “airline trainer programme” in the summer, which will cover everything from engineering to cabin crew training.

Much of the course will fit with the QCA’s Qualifications and Credit Framework, which allows credits for units of work to build up to full qualifications over time.

The company hopes to award qualifications equal to good GCSEs and up to university degrees.

Network Rail is piloting an initial qualification in track engineering and hopes to issue qualifications equivalent to GCSEs, but with some units at postgraduate level that could contribute to a master’s qualification.

Speaking on GMTV, Brown said: “You have got to do a pretty intensive course to get that qualification. It’s not that standards are going to fall. It’s going to be a tough course. Once you’ve got that qualification you can go anywhere.”

I am in York at a meeting of the Jisc Emerge programme. There seems to be increasing disillusionment with Facebook. And the evidence against Facebook is mounting. This is from the latest edition of the LabourStart newsletter.

“Facebook, the social networking website, is getting a lot of attention these days. In the trade union movement, there are differences of opinion about how useful Facebook actually is. Some of us are making a real effort to find out by using Facebook as an organizing tool. One of them is senior LabourStart correspondent Derek Blackadder, from Canada. Derek’s day job is as a staffer for the country’s largest union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). He’s one of the people who thinks Facebook is potentially quite useful for trade unionists.

Well, maybe not so much anymore. You see, a few days ago, Derek was banned from Facebook. I’ll let John Wood from the U.K. tell the story in his own words: Derek got a note from the good book, telling him he was trying to add too many friends, and should calm down a bit, or else. Now as a union organiser, he’s quite likely to want to add lots of friends – it’s kind of what he does. So he waits a bit and tries again, and is told he can’t add any more at the moment and to wait and try later. Fair enough. He waits a bit more and tries again, same message. By now, he’s probably frothing at the mouth and muttering “must organise, must organise”, so he has another go to see if the coast is clear, and promptly gets himself a ban. That being a ban from Facebook itself – no more profile, no access to the stuff he’s built up, no appeal.

John has launched a Facebook group to sign people up to protest the ban on Derek. I am writing to ask each and every one of you to take a moment and sign up to join the group. “Eric Lee, who runs LabourStart suggests supporters should join Facebook. He says “I know that most of you are not yet signed up to Facebook. This is good time to see whether we can mobilize the kind of support — the thousands of names — that will force the owners of Facebook to reverse course and allow Derek to do what he does so well: organize.”

I am not sure we should encourage people to join Facebook. It may be time to campaign and organise against the platform owners.

I am delighted to post the latest in our occasional series of guest blogs. Jenny Hughes is a great friend of mine and works for Pontydysgu. She is not a regular blogger but that has not stopped us having many discussions about blogging.

“I’ve been staying with Graham in Bremen for the last 10 days. We’ve drunk too much, smoked too much, spent every evening in the pub making copious notes on beer mats and then stayed up every night discussing ideas that are going to change the world. OK when you are a student but the wisdom of doing this when you are approaching 60 is doubtful. The outcome of it all is that we did prodigious amounts of work but Graham, being the more geriatric of the two of us, is still in his bed, exhausted, at 11 am on Wednesday.

We also made lists. Every night in the bar, we made a list of work we simply had to do the next day – which we then lost and the following evening we made a new list. Last night’s list said “must do my blog – Gra” but as we crawled out of the Viva (one of the best bars in Bremen) on the wrong side of midnight, Graham’s last slurred whimper was  “You’ll hash to do m’blog f’me.”

So here goes…..

As I said, this week has been a strange mix of ‘doing’ (uninterrupted hours of banging away at a keyboard) ‘talking’ (shared coffee and fag breaks) and ‘thinking’ (invariably between 10 pm and 3 or 4 am in the Viva). Nothing particularly unusual about this except that I was fascinated how the agenda became so explicit and the fact that were planning-in thinking time (which was, in fact, intensive talk time) as opposed to ‘talking time’ when we tended to discuss what we were going to think about. (Keeping up?)  It made me wonder how many people actually have this luxury – a job where you can sit in the pub and get paid for ‘doing thinking’.

One of the first things Gra told me to ‘do thinking about…’ was the  idea of ‘bricolage’, as used by John Steely Brown to describe the different way that kids are learning in the digital age.  What JSB said was

“Classically reasoning has been concerned with the deductive and the abstract. But our observation of kids working with digital media suggests bricolage to us more than abstract logic. Bricolage…..relates to the concrete. It has to do with abilities to find something – an object, tool document, a piece of code – and to use it to build something you deem important. Judgment is inherently critical to becoming an effective bricoleur.”

Other than a month in France last summer renovating a house – which meant a daily trip to the bricollage (DIY) shop, I had largely forgotten the concept. In fact, ‘Bricolage’ was a word which I had always felt was becoming ‘devalued’ used as it now is for naming coffee bars, nightcubs, content mangagement software, record labels and the like.

However, I think JSB use of the term is interesting and helpful. This was a concept which had fascinated me as a student back in the 60’s and 70’s, when Claude Levi-Strauss was one of my guru,s but which I had not thought to apply in this context. JSB had tripped some useful switches for me.

In fact I thought it might be interesting for me to go back to the source of these ideas to see whether I could make anymore connections so I revisited “The Savage Mind” (1966) and came up with some (personally) useful ‘treasures’ (treasures = the word Levi Strauss used to describe the ‘bits and pieces’ of  knowledge a bricoleur has in his chest).

One of his (L-S)  key ideas is that 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.

Meaning what exactly….well, the examples most often used examples are drawn from popular culture. For example the  construction of the Teddy Boy style of the 50’s combined an otherwise unrelated Edwardian upper-class look, a Mid West American cowboy bootlace tie and brothel creepers in the context of a youth culture. Likewise the boots, braces, shaved hair, Stayprest shirts and Ska music of the Skinheads of the 70s was a symbolic bricolage that signifies the hardness of working class masculinity.

That is not an un-useful idea for me.  There was a time when use of computers, electronic communication technology, instruments, an impenetrable technical language and the like were all part of the cultural ‘myth’ of the scientist, the academic boffin in his laboratory surrounded by wires and huge machines that in someway symbolized the idea of personal discovery and making the break through that would re-shape the world…..Conversely, ‘tools’ were symbols of craftsmen, the myth of the ‘honest artisan’.

Now I am the parent of 5 children, computers, electronic communication thingummies, gadgets, widgets, technobabble and a house full of grunting teenagers with surgically attached headphones, mobile phones Velcro-ed to their ears and  I-pods at breakfast are all part of the cultural myth of “Yoof”.

Which, of course is in total opposition to the cultural myth called ‘education and learning’.  How many parents (and the Daily Telegraph and Chris Woodward)  be-moan the fact that ‘can’t get their children to pick up a book’ or ‘they never read nowdays’ or restrict access times to computers ‘because it’s bad for them’ and they ‘should be doing their homework’ and ‘you can’t tear them away from their screens’? Hmmm! When I was a kid it was ‘ Could you get out head out of that book and do something useful.’

The other main use of the term Bricolage, is ‘the juxtaposition of signs in the visual media to form a collage of images from different times and places. This kind of bricolage as a cultural style is a core element of post-modern culture. (Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies)

So we have concrete shopping centres with ‘modern’ architecture incorporating cafes with stripped pine furniture and red-checked Mid West ranch house table cloths juxtaposed with jungle areas of exotic plants and Victoriana pubs.

[Some people would call it kitsch (if done with irony), for others it is post modernism!]

In the same way the global multiplication of communication technologies has created an increasingly complex semiotic environment of competing signs and meanings. This creates a flow of images and juxtapositions that fuses news, drama, reportage, advertising etc into an electronic bricolage. Some people have started to use that horrible word ‘edutainment’ to try and capture this but communication bricolage works better for me.

My ramblings are about to end rather abruptly because Graham has just got up and I can hear the sweet noise of the coffee grinder …

“Graham – is blogging a post modern version of a diary or is it just kitsch…?”

(answer not printable).”

Been catching up on the administration – I am sure you all wanted to know that. But at the end of the week it is back on the road. On Thursday and Friday I will be in York at the Jisc Emerge conference. And on Friday evening o travel to Halle – near Leipzig it seems – for the first meeting of the European funded ICONET project.

As ever if anyone is around and wants to meet up that would be cool. Given that I travel quite a lot I set myself up an account on the new social network, Dopplr.

Seems a smart idea – but to be really useful – especially in allowing yiu to work out where your friends are going to be – you need a big social network on the site. And so far only my friend and colleague Eileen is sharing with me. She is at home – at least that is what Dopplr says. Help – I am lonely – anyone else got an account on the site?