I am still interested in experimenting with different formats for conference presentations. Of course the call for contributions and formats for different conferences will limit the possibilities (as often does the design of the conference environment). The European Conference on Educational Research offers the possibility for workshops but, in may experience, there are very few workshops and all too often it is difficult to tell the difference between a paper sessions and a workshop sessions.

This year I submitted a proposal for a workshop around the G8WAY project on educational transitions. This was the proposal:

” A major characteristic of European societies is the rapidly growing differentiation of educational pathways, opportunities and biographies. This increase in complexity  requires great effort from learners into initiative taking, creativity, problem solving, risk assessment and decision taking. Through the past years various structures have been developed in order to support students in mastering educational transition. However they have been often formulated in an institutional perspective, discounting learners’ experience and creativity skills as well as new opportunities of technology enhanced learning.

The research workshop is based on the European Commission funded G8WAY project. G8WAY is based on the idea, that the growing availability of web 2.0 tools allows for bridging this gap through learner centred and connective approaches, with a chance to more effectively manage educational transition. Thus, G8WAY is developing web 2.0 enhanced learning environments, which will enable learners to reflect and develop creativity potentials and transitional skills in the light of self and others’ learning experience, made visible through a variety of media sets and PLE tools, each of them designed to meet the requirements of transition envisaged, and all of which are mapped into one single pedagogy framework.

G8WAY is producing 3 transition scenarios:

1. school to work and
2. general to higher education.
3. Higher education to work

For each of the scenarios a problem oriented concept and case based reasoning method will be developed and embedded into a web 2.0 learning environment to facilitate reflection, case based reasoning and experimental learning on self and other’s learning experience across different educational contexts and towards the development of transitional skills. To this purpose G8WAY will develop web 2.0 learning environments combining a variety of media sets and ICT enhanced learning tools, which are connected through a single pedagogy framework.

The research workshop is intended to form an active part of the G8WAY project, allowing connection and input from the wider educational research community to the projects work and outcomes.

This will involve collaborative exploration of a series of interlinked issues:

• What are the issues in transitions between education institutions and between education and work
• What competences are required to deal with transitions
• How can these competences be acquired
• How can informal learning be facilitated to bridge scaffold transition processes
• How can thinking & reflection, conversation & interaction, experience & activity or evidence & demonstration be supported in transition scenarios
• How can we use Web 2.0 and social software to support transition processes
• Where do learners gain support from teachers, trainers or peers in managing their own learning for transition
• What roles could Personal Learning Networks or Personal Learning Environments play in transition processes”

It all sounded very fine when I wrote the proposal last January. But the proposal didn’t require me to say HOW i was going to design and run the workshop. I only had one and a quarter hours and to make it worse the workshop was scheduled for the final confernce session – after lunch on a Friday afternoon. What I wanted to do was to go beyind brainstrorming or group work around teh main ideas of the project and inclove particpants in the ongoing research of the project.

The G8WAY project has been undertaking a series of ‘case studies’ of transitions, based on a  story telling approach. To date we have gathered stories from 60 people, in six different countries. We have published the stories on the G8WAY project web site.  At the present time we have two working groups who are looking at the school to university transition case studies and the university to work case studies with the aim of deriving a limited number of persona. These persona are intended to provide a basis for developing social software to assist young people in educational transitions.

We had about 20 particpants in the workshop. I asked them to work in pairs. each pair was given one of the transition stories and asked to analyse it with respect to:

a) Foregrounded and backgrounding of issues in transition, as told in the case study

b) Possible spaces for intervention to support the transition

And, somewhat to my surprise, everyone not only dived into the work but seemed to enjoy it. Indeed, the only regret was that the time was too short. Backgorund issues and potential rooms for interventionf romt he different case studies included:

• Family pressure – need spaces for empowerment and rethinking of options
• Cultural integration – need for spaces / approaches allowing exploration of intergenerational issues
• Lack of support from colleagues in temporary employment – need for more support in finding appropriate job vacancies
• Instability – need for signposting to professional support
• Unsure of identity = need for peer group contact and communication

Of course, without the original case studies this feedback makes little sense. But there was a genuine enthusiasm and interest form participants both in our work and in the process. This has led me to think if we should not extend the exercise,through our project web site, allowing those who are interested but not a project partner to contribute to the project research. Of course that raises the question of why anyone would want to participate voluntarily in ‘Open Research’? The answer I think lies in the relation between research and learning. Participation in a research project can be a powerful form of learning or professional development.

I am constantly being asked to fill in questionnaires and surveys to support different projects. But seldom does the opportunity for involvement go beyond that. It will require some creativity and imagination, but I see no reason why we shouldn’t start opening up our research to all those interested. And that is not just the obligatory bulletin board for visitors to ask questions or add a comment. It means redesigning the research methodologies and processes to allow others to participate. More to come in a future post….

The first in a series of posts on the recent Association for Learning Technologies Conference (AltC) in Nottingham.  Besides the social side of meeting up with friends from across the UK, AltC is a good place for picking up on the trends in educational technology and, above all judging the mood of the community.

But first, a little about the formal part of the conference (at least the first day, more to follow on subsequent sessions).

I had some trouble getting to the conference due to strikes in London, and ended up listening to the first morning’s keynote through Elluminate on a G3 connection to my computer on a slow cross country train. That felt a little strange but worked quite well. The presentation by Donald Woods Clark (CEO of Epic Learning) was quite strange. variously described by delegates as a ‘traincrash’ and a ‘Glasgow Kiss’ (non UK readers will have to look that one up on Wikipedia!). Woods generally treated delegates to a didactic rant around his prejudices about education. He had never been to Alt C before, he told delegates, because conferences were a waste of time. He was getting angry, he said on a number of occasions (his swearing attracted some comments on twitter). His presentation was focused on the uselessness of lectures. Yet his preferred learning, apart from blogging, appeared to be watching recordings of lectures on iTunes U! It was overall a curious presentation, which although having the virtue of provoking much discussion over form, had little in content to discuss. A pity because I think he did have a theme which got lost in the invective. His general line, with which I have some sympathy, was that the present model of education is unsustainable and especially at university level cannot be expanded to include all those who wish to pursue a higher education. However, where he totally failed, was in putting forward any coherent vision of what an alternative might be – either at an organisational or pedagogic level. He seemed to dismiss the idea of any social aspect to learning. Instead he saw technology per se as the answer. or at least that is the impression I got from my train seat vantage point.

I was greatly impressed with the Tuesday early afternoon session with Helen Beetham et al on Digital Literacies. The work she and colleagues are carrying out for Jisc seems to me to be providing a richer pedagogic approach to how we can use technology for learning and an integration of technology as a transformative force in tecahing and learning. Haydon Buckley, in stark contrast to the morning keynote, treated us to an excellent example of the power of the spoken word, when, without powerpoints, he told us about experiences at the University of Glamorgan in introducing digital literacy across the curriculum (that was a speech which should have been streamed). The only thing which slightly puzzled me in the otherwise excellent pack of materials the Jisc funded project has produced is the underpinning Digital Literacies Framework model. The materials are available through the project Cloudworks site (however they link to slideshare and downloads from there do not seem to be working properly).  However my problem was that the model preserves the traditional UK distinction of ‘skills’. This tendency to separate skills from competence or from content underpins many problems in developing and implementing new pedagogic approaches to learning.

The third session I attended was a lot of fun.James Clay led a workshop entitled ‘Do you like books or do you like learning’? He demoed a number of different ebook readers and talked about experiences of using these devices at Gloucester College. This sparked considerable debate particularly about the relationships between publishers and the education community. My personal view is that cheap ebook readers may be one of the most significant scene changers in education, particularly as the use of the devices will span home and work, educational use and uses for pleasure.

One of the mots encouraging trends at the conference was the increasing move away from a focus on educational technology towards a focus on learning. Thus many of the research papers were drawing on social science methodologies and approaches. With the increasing integration of technology in teaching and learning, I wonder how much longer we are going to need conferences geared specifically at learning technologies.

However, underpinning the conference was the looming cutbacks in funding. This has already hit the educational technology sector with the forthcoming closure of Becta and the reduction in funding for Jisc.  The UK’s leading role in the use of technology for learning has been driven both by irelatuively generous unfrastructure investment but above all by very substatial project funding. Those days are over and a mood of uncertainty over the future pervaded the conference. Whilst there were attempts to pput a brave face on things through looking at increased pressues for sharing and the potential of bottom up networks, it seems unlikely the rate of innovation can be sustained without funding. Of course it is possible to question how effective that funding has been with may innovations remeianing isloated in islands of practice. Once more the likelhood is a refocusing on education and the role of technology in tecahing and learning, rather than the focus of many projects on innovationsin learning technologies, with pedagogy and teaching and learning playing second fiddle.

Further reports to follow.

I talked in previous posts about our work with the European Conference on Educational Research to ‘amplify’ the conference, recently held in Vienna. This involved setting up various social media channels including a Twitter stream and a iTunesU page, producing a series of video interviews with conveners of the different networks which organise ECER and b9radcasting three live radio shows from the conference.

We also undertook to stream four keynote speeches, run in two parallel sessions as well as the opening. Easy, I thought. Like many of you I have live streamed from different events, pointing a camera or even a MacBook at the speaker and linking in to  uStream or Justin.tv or one of the other social video platforms. It turned out not to be so simple.

We were working with a community not generally used to social media. And quite simply, the idea of pointing them to a platform advertising poker, acne treatments didn’t seem a good idea. Plus we had an issue with the reliability and quality of the free services. Livestream looked a better idea especially though their premium accounts. This allows you to have your own channel and remove the adverts.but a single channel on Livestream costs 350 dollars a month, with twelve months billing in advance. And we needed two channels. Back to the drawing board. We discovered that Ustream has set up another service called Watershed and indeed for a time were tempted by this. Watershed offers per view payments, but the prices are relatively high. And the terms and conditions of service for the monthly or annual contracts was impenetrable. No problem, we thought, we will ring them and clarify the conditions. Then we discovered there was no telephone number on their site. All you cold do was ask questions on a bulletin board, largely filled with complaints about the service and the total lack of technical support.

OK – so that didn’t seem such a good idea. Last resort – ask a friend. I twittered out for anyone with ideas of a service we could use. And somewhat to my surprise, no-one could come up with a solution, other than the services we had already looked at.

Back to searching on the Internet. Of course there are many companies offering professional streaming services but they all seem geared towards corporate or media organisations, not towards education or for relatively low numbers of live viewers.

I finally stumbled on a web site from a Canadian company called NetroMedia. Their prices were not clear but they said that for one off events you could fill in a query form. So I did, not with any great hope. To my surprise about half an hour later, I had an email reply asking for more details about the event I wished to stream. And to my even greater surprise, some forty minutes after returning this a person rang me. Yes, a real live person!!!

She calculated how much bandwidth we would need and offered us a service for 100 Canadian dollars, plus 20 dollars for unlimited technical support. (Note that if you buy into this or a similar service, it is important to buy sufficient bandwidth in advance, extra bandwidth per view is relatively expensive). Woo, away we go. Even better some twenty minutes after paying them, Darren, the technical support man rung us. This was very helpful, because although the set up is relatively simple, we required two video streams going out simultaneously, and that required a little fiddling.

NetroMedia do not offer a portal for streams. Instead they provide a streaming service and you embed a Flash video player in your own web site. This suited us just fine. The up stream was encoded through the free Adobe Flash Media Encoder, which worked well on both a PC and a Mac. The only thing I would like is to have more direction control over what we were streaming – e.g to be able to switch between a feed from the data projector and the video but I am sure we can work out how to do that. I am very happy with the quality of the streaming (you can view the recordings by clicking on read more on each of the channels on the ECER video streaming web page) although we were helped in this regard by the kind loan from Helsinki University of two very good video cameras.

Of course, if you are working in a University or large organisation, you may be able to run your own streaming server.But such an investment is beyond Pontydysgu, or I guess many small organisations. Yet video streaming is going to be an important part of Amplifying future events. And we need a reliable and reasonable quality of service.  I would certainly go to Netromedia again. But I also wonder if there is some way we could collectively organise resources for streaming in the educational technology community to both share know-how and expertise and infrastructure.

The autumn conference season is in full swing. One  of my favourites is Online Educa Berlin – this year being held on 2 and 3 December. If nothing else Online Educa is a great social event – a chance to catch up with friends from round the world. Online Educa also organises a series of pre conference workshops on 1 December. and this year we are organising a workshop for the European funded G8WAY project on educational transitions. Whilst there is a fee for many of the workshops, the G8WAY event is sponsored by the project and is free to participants.

The workshop will focus on the issue of how educational transitions can be made easier for young people through Internet-based services (e.g. career advice, information and guidance).

According to the workshop website the importance of helping young people in their quest to find employment is widely recognised and there is growing interest in the potential of technology-assisted learning when it comes to helping young people make the transition from education to employment. However, this area of learning remains in its infancy and throws up a series of issues for policymakers, researchers and practitioners alike.

The European project G8WAY: Enhanced Gateway to Educational Transition is investigating how social software and Web 2.0 applications can be used to help young people in make transitions.

The following key issues will be explored in the workshop:

• What are the challenges of educational transitions – how can young people start a career in recession-hit European societies?
• What is the potential of social software and Web 2.0 tools in the context of transitions?
• What role can careers guidance and support play in this process?
• What is the future of technology-based learning regarding career education?

The active involvement of participants, exchange of expertise and creation and further development of ideas will be the key elements of this pre-conference workshop.

whilst the workshop is free places are limited and pre registration is necessary. If you are going to be in Berlin, don’t miss our workshop.