last week was spent with my head in a bunch of spreadsheets doing the Pontydysgu accounts.

But this week I’m on the road. tomorrow and Thursday Pontydysgu is organising an international seminar in Newport, Wales on the Training of Trainers in Europe. And Thurdsay night I am off to Braga for a conference on web 2.0, social software and learning. Saturday I am presenting at Bar Camp Berlin through a video tie up from Braga. Then a quick flight to Bremen and on Sunday I am off to Glasgow for a meeting with Careers Scotland. Tuesday night I will be in Maidstone, Kent for a meeting on e-Portfolios. Back to Bremen for three days, then Barcelona. The following week is Seville and perhaps London. Phew. But the real point is that if our paths are crossing I would love to meet up with any of you. Just send me an email saying where you will be.

Jenny Hughes has had a hard week editing a handbook for teachers on technology. The stress is begining to show. Whilst waiting for partners from the Taccle project (who are producing the handbook) to arrive, she twittered to me this reflection on teachers and nerdyness on an open skype channel :). And teachers – we love you really. LOL

“teachers get nerdy about who sits where in staff room
17:56

and nerdy about cardigans
17:56

and potted plants on the window sill
17:56

and using a ruler to do their register
17:56

and not lending anyone their red pen
17:57

and sandwiches in tupperware containers
17:57

and the Daily Mail
17:58

and whether its morally justified in going on strike when the future of the world is in their hand
17:58

and keeping peppermints in their desk
17:59

and seeig if they can make their suply of sugar paper last longer than anyone else
17:59

and nature tables
18:00

and box pleated skirts
18:00

(thats just the men)
18:00

and having special things for de-icing their windows
18:01

and posting a list of Rules of the Staff Room on the wall
18:02

which always starts with the milk and biscuit buying rota
18:02

and ends with a warning about not leaving dirty cups
18:02

which is underlined 3 times
18:03

with too many exclamation marks
18:03

but computers, I assure you, they are not nerdy about
18:05

Mind you (because Im bored sitting in hotel waiting for foreigners) teachers do have some techy skills
18:09

they are very good with shoe lace technology
18:12

have built in sensors and rapid response programmes for spotting the kid who is going to throw up or piss themselves
18:13

some of us were shit hot on the ballistics of board rubbers
18:14

(you have to be able to get  them to land wood side down on the desk to give kid nasty noisy fright or felt side down to leave them spluttering and coughing in a cloud of chalk dust. Its a high level skill)
18:18

they are competent at every sort of print technology from Caxton, through spirit copiers, Bandas, Roneos and Gestetners with or without wax stencils and including John Bull printing outfits. You can assess competence by seeing how big the pink, purple or green stain on their fingers is.
18:20

the older ones    can still tune the wireless in to Music and Movement (with Daphne Oxenford)
18:22

and some of them can even fit together those plastic shapes that make geodesic domes. The others stuff them in the back of the cupboard and hope the kids don’t find them
18:23

they are really good at measuring the length of the playground with a push along wheely thing and they check it every year just to make sure
18:24

and best of all they have pencil sharpeners whith a handle you turn on their desks. They are awesome.
18:25

so not entirely techno deficient
18:27

it’s just those com…comt…compu things
18:27

on line again tomorrow
18:29

Continuing the open learning debate….I greatly like this diagramme by George Siemens. I think there is much of merit here. Very happpy to see acknowledgemnt of the importance of self publishing (as opposed to academic reporsitories). However there are a few things missed out.

Firstly if we take congniscence of Jenny Hughes’ defintion of learning as ‘to find and follow a track’ as counterposed to curriculum  from the latin ‘currere’, which means to run or race and ‘curriculum’ as race or racecourse, then instotutions and teacher have an important role in assisting learners in developing their own learning pathways.

A second important  role is that of assessment. But to understand this we need to decouple assessment from acceditation. If we design assessment as a learning process and move from assessemnt of learning to asssessement for learning this could become an integral part of the process of finding and developing learning pathways. This is not so utopian. Serendipitously. The Times newpaper today published an article about innovative assessment in UK universities. The struggle, though, as with self and peer assessment is in assessment having to match accreditation procedures. Without this link, we could open up all jinds of new forms of assessment.

A final point on accreditation. Many learners do not want or require accreditation. Indeed it is the formal accreditation procedures which deters them for signing up for a learning programme. And as Antnio Fini, talking about the home made certificate he got from the OpenEd2007 course, says: “all my connections, blog posts, comments, collective works, presentations, articles related to that experience, are still out there as tangible proofs of this learning. So I could equally put the OpenEd course in my CV and could ask to my supervisor to evaluate all that activity for credit in my PhD, also without that piece of paper!”

Why not put the learners in charge of accreditation. Lets leave it to them to decide how they wish to show what and how they have learned – albeit with support. I once co-ran a course with Jenny Hughes where we offered the particpants their certificate at the start of the courese. They refused! But it did raise the issue of why they were doing the course and how they valued learning. And that is an issue we need to bring to the fore.

Every month we are running Sounds of the Bazaar ‘Emerging Mondays’ – a topical live internet radio show combining the best of radio, live chat and occasionally some extravagant social activity inside Second Life. The aim is to bring lively commentary and debate on topical issues to the start of each month.

Upcoming

27th October 2008: Emerging Mondays: the Digital Identity show

‘What is digital identity?’

So what does digital identity mean to you? Do you care? As more of our lives, from personal to professional activities, find their way online how do we cope with managing our fractured and distributed digital presence. Can we ever keep ‘personal’ separate from ‘professional’ when tools and services mash-up our online identities in ways that are beyond our control? What does this mean for the development of new literacies and new services that seek to put our identities back within our grasp.

With interviews, music, strong opinion, poetry, our very own edupunk granny Leila and more. LIVE.

Have you got soemthing to say about identities. Would you liek to come on th programme through a skype or telephone link-up. In depth interviews or just two minute vox spots are all welcome. Tell us a story or read a poem. If you are interested just drop  me an email – graham10 [@] mac.com.

We will be broadcasting *LIVE* from 1800 – 1900 UK time, 1900 – 2000 Central European Time. Links to the programme url and chatroom to follow.

First we had open educational resources. This was a step forward but the resources were variable in quality, hard to find and were often tied to courses which made them hard to use for self study. Those issues haven’t gone away but improvements in search technologies and a wider general conciousness about the value of self publishing open resources means it is increasingly easy to find what you want.

And now we are witnessing an explosion in open learning. Of course there are the big publicity happenings like the CCK08 Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)  organised by Stephen Downes and George Siemans on connectivism.

But more important is the flowering of opportunties for learning from many, many diverse sources. One of the best things about Twitter is it opens access to many events going on and opportunities to partiucpate at a distance. Last week I dropped in on a TeachMeet session being organised as part of the Scottish Learning Festival. Someone had ‘shouted it out” in Twitter, I followed the link and ended up in a broadcast over the UK Open Universities free Flashmeeting service. There was about twenty or so of us particpating online. Whilst the quality of the video sometimes left something to be desired (and I was stuggling to follow Glaswegian accents) this was more than made up for by the quality and humour in the online chat.

Yesterday morning I recieved this in my email: “You have a live session today with cristinacost on ‘Connecting Online : Sharing Life’s Experiences’. The session will start at 10:00 AM W. Europe Standard Time and is 60 minutes long.”  This is a free course being organised in the WizIQ environment. Sadly I am bogged down in administration and had no time to go. But over the last year there has been an explosion of such open courses and seminars. We are organising one such series oursleves through the Jisc Evolve project.

And this morning Cristina Costa showed me her online bookclub “Living Literature though Exploration.” This more than anything impresses me as to how we have moved towards real open learning through Web 2.0 tools (in this case as simplle as a shared blog and some bookmarks.

However there remain a number of issues.

The last barrier to open learning – and a very complex one – is that of accreditation. Whilst I am sceptical about the Connectivism MOOC, it is raising a number of central questions about open learning, not least that of accreditation. Under the Connectivism course model, only 34 (I think) sdtudents are offically enrolled for accreditation and therefore pay fees. Their fees pay for the costs of the course which is open and free to everyone else. As part of this they get feedback form tutors on course assignments and accreditation at the end of the course. How important is this for learning? And would it be possible for a student to develop a portfolio based on particpation in the course and then claim accreditation elsewhere? Are we moving to a model where learning is open but institutions have a major role in accrediting that learning (presumably through a portfolio model)? Can we develop a concept of open accreditation? And what would that mean?

In the last few months I have been witnessing a more visible presence of the German community online and really great stuff has emerged from my sporadic explorations through .de and .at ground. Mind you, they probably were already there for long, and I have definitely missed a lot, but I am now trying to catch up with it, or at least trying to keep up to speed with the latests.

[ amazing how we can easily restrict our searches and connections to an English speaking world… at least this is my perspective. I google in English, I tag in English, 95% of my network and community activities have English as the main communication channel. that’s not bad at all, but there’s other landsacpes emerging in paralel, and it is great to know that this is happening]

There are two initiatives I would sepcially like to mention today:

Mixxt.org

“Mixxt is an online kit for creating your own social network. Individuals, organisations or enterprises can start their own community with mixxt and don’t even need a technical background knowledge for that. Your new social network is just a few mouse clicks away. Think of various applications being possible with mixxt (the sky is the limit): Share your know-how and your interests with others, organise your meetings and events, bring your friends, colleagues or business partners together on the Internet and keep in touch with other users.”

By default, mixxt offers the following features for free:

• public or private networks
• member administration
• single sign on for all networks
• discussion forum
• wiki (text administration)
• event module and calender
• photo sharing
• newsletter and group mail, being send directly to the members’ email addresses
• private message center
• adjustable privacy settings
• news import via RSS-feed
• data export via CSV
• video and blog module on request

This definitelly looks good. 🙂

This week I also joined a group called everything web  2.0 in another network I was introduced a couple of months ago: Xing.

And there while in my random explorations I found this reference to a new micro-blogging service: Bleeper.de

What really impressed me in yet this one-more-service was not it’s interface (quite similar to twitter I must say) but the fact that it is a free service running on open source software and automatically licensing all the users posted data under a CC license. What can I say, I found it  at least interesting!

And if my bad “Deutsch” is something to trust, looks like that in the future bleeper will be working on more feautures:

• More AJAXand user interface;
• Roadmap;
• Pulling and sending data from others services such as Twitter, Jaiku, etc.;
• Facebook Integration;
• Picture, Video and Audio updates.

It definitelly doesn’t look bad.

It now makes me curious to know what is being doen in other countries and other languages. If you know of some cool, yet less popular initiatives out there, please let us know.

…. I am off to finally subcribe for French classes. Who know…one of these days I will “invading” the web with some lousy French too…and hopefully bumping with other pleasant surprises! 🙂

Pontydysgu is happy to be supporting the first (as far as we know) on-line international conference on the training of trainers taking place on the 5 and 6 November 2008. The conference is for all those interested in the training and professional development of teachers and trainers. This includes teachers, trainers, tutors, researchers, managers and policy makers and other interested individuals.

The conference will take place through the internet using the Elluminate conference tool. We hope this will not only reduce the carbon footprint of our activities, but will allow wide participation by those who might not be able to travel.

The conference will be organised around four themes:

• Theme 1 – The changing role of trainers in learning
• Theme 2: E-learning for trainers
• Theme 3: Work-based learning
• Theme 4: Support for the professional development of trainers

You can find full details including a prelimary programme and details of speakers on the conference web pages. Attendance is free but we would ask you to register in advance. You are also welcome to contribute to the conference on-line exhibition.

Edupunk will never die. From latest edition of Wired mag as posted by edupunk pioneer Jim Groom.

Please don’t groan at yet another post on Personal Learning Environments. Well – I hope not becuase there are a few more in the pipeline. Why am I so focused. Besides my interest in how to change what I see as a grossly unfair and non-functional education system, because I am a partner on the EU funded Mature project which seeks to use PLEs to foster knowledge maturation.And I am using this blog as a jotting pad for confused ideas!

The problem with much of the debate for me, is that it is focused on hwo we use PLEs in education – or more narrowly in higher education. As such it is about replacing VLEs, letting go of control, providing services etc. Indeed we spend much of our time defining PLEs by what they are not! But what about those not in education – or at least those for whom formal learning is a episodic event? And what about using PLEs in the workplace? There has been very little dicussion around these issues and yet I think this may be where the real power of PLEs lies. Of couse everyone has their own PLE – if we take the widest sense of an enevironment in which we learn and if we accept that all working environments foster or constrain learning to a different extent. So one issue is simply how to design learning conducive working environments. But in a study we have undertaken for the Mature project (not yet available) we found that individuals have highly idiosyncratic ways of developing, managing and sharing knowledge, ranging from post-it notes and carrier bags to PDAs and voice recorders. On the one hand they are concious of their need for information and knowledge, on the other hand spend little time considering just how they meet such a need. And of course ICT comfidence and competence varies greatly.

We face a number of challenges in introducing PLEs for these knowledge rich workers. To what extent do we want to challenge the personal strategies people already have – especially if they are working for them? How can PLE tools be made to integrate within the working environment? At a more funadamental level what are these tools? What added value will they produce?

Yes – we can develop a range of services – calenders, access to research and resources and can provide these in flexible and multiple formats. But services alone do not mean learning. Much of the present learning is informal and much comes out of involvement in multiple networks – both organisational and personal. How can we build on the power of networks to enhance learning?

What is necessary for learning to take place? In a recent skype channel chat Jenny Hughes suggested that learning depends on readiness, preparedness and motivation. Readiness, she said, is about prerequisite skills and knowledge and physical and intellectual and emotional state or stage of development; preparedness is about having the time, the technology, the environment etc. and motivation is will or desire. If there are opportunties for informal learning in everyday work, then a PLE can assist in the preparedness for learning but can do little for readiness for motivation.

To be continued……

Jenny Hughes has been undertaking the thankless task of trying to edit (or more to rewrite) an article of mine on Personal Learning Environments as part of a handbook for teachers for the Taccle project.

I am intrigued by her reference ot the orgins of the words ‘curriculum’ and ‘learning’ in this excerpt from the draft:

“Traditionally, knowledge has been conceived of something possed by ‘experts’ . The formal education curriculum is based on the idea that learning can be neatly and conveniently divided into subject areas which in turn are based on traditional university disciplines.  The people who have the knowledge (the teachers) are accorded higher status than those that do not (the learners) and although all good teachers maintain that they learn a lot from their pupils, the passage of information is conceived as being one-way. There are desgnated places (schools) where learning officially takes place, where learning is tested and  which control access to the next stage or level of learning

The new technologies have challenged this status quo.  The explosion of freely available sources of information has increased the range of knowledge available to people and has made it accessible when and where they want it, in bite sized chunks that do not necessarily form a coherent subject discipline.

We are moving from the idea of knowledge being developed and controlled by experts to collaborative knowledge construction which can be facilitated by the use of social software, as we describe above. Even more importantly, we are starting to rethink what qualifies as ‘knowledge’.  Instead of the ‘curriculum’ being defined by experts, communities of people interested in the same things – or even just by being part of a community – are acting as a curriculum.

Interestingly, the word curriculum comes from the latin ‘currere’, which means to run or race and ‘curriculum’ was a race or racecourse. It is easy to see how this was adopted to describe a learning course which had a starting point, travelled along a straight route and reached a finishing point with competitors battling with each other to finish first or to be the best.

Maybe for the first time learning has stopped being a race course. Conversely ‘to learn’ originally meant ‘to find and follow a track’  and this seems to sum up rather well the current shift in emphasis from formal curriculum to informal learning.

This changing model requires not only different approaches but different technologies and implicit is the change from an institutional approach to learning to a more learner centred approach.”