The summer is supposed to be quiet – but not this year! Even before I have written my belated reflections on the brilliant 2013 PLE conference held in Berlin and Melbourne, it is time for the first announcement on PLE 2014. As regulars will know the PLE conference has a slogan – one conference – two venues. And each year we put out an open call for those interested in hosting the conference. So here is your chance.

The PLE Conference 2014 – an Open Call for hosts

The first PLE Conference was in 2010 in Barcelona. And it was so fantastic everyone asked where it would be next. So 2011 we were in Southampton. in 2012 it was Aveiro in Portugal. And this year PLE was hosted in Berlin. Meanwhile people from the south of the world asked for their own parallel conference. In 2012 and 2013 this has been organised in Melbourne, Australia.

In this time PLE conference has developed its own unique atmosphere and style with many saying it is their favourite conference.

Which leads to the next question – where will the PLE conference be in 2014? We have also developed a tradition of publishing an open call. Would you and your organisation like to host the PLE conference next year?

You will preferably be somewhere reasonably accessible and have access to spaces conducive for intensive and sociable knowledge sharing. You will probably need the support of your organisation. And despite the great support from the PLE Conference Organising Committee you will need to commit yourself to some hard work.

If you think this sounds like you please contact Graham Attwell or another member of the PLE Committee by September 20, 2013. Also feel free to ask us anything you need more information about.

I guess many of you are enjoying your holidays now. Here at Pontydysgu we’re ploughing ahead with our summer project, codenamed Rapid Turbine. Rapid Turbine is a spin out from the Learning layers project design group called Sharing Turbine.

The design idea has followed extensive discussion with Bau ABC, a large training organisation for the building industry in Lower Saxony and Bremen in north Germany. The apprenticeship system in Germany is based on a Dual System, with apprentices learning both within companies and within vocational schools. However in the construction trade there are three venues for learning, the company, the vocational school and the training centres.

Training in the training centre is organised around practical tasks which may take from one to three or four days to complete. The tasks are documented in something called the White Folder which is also used for reporting on work. This has a number fo problems – it takes time to update content and despite the use of colour photocopying has limitations in terms of media. Perhaps the biggest drawback is teh lack of portability, thus limiting the use of learning materials or of apprentices/ past learning in the company or the vocational school.

Thus the idea of Sharing Turbine is to produce a mobile app which can provide interactivity whilst undertaking workplace learning tasks. But the more we have looked at developing such an app – the more daunting it seems. Wireframes and diagrams have multiplied, with multiple use cases and endless meetings.

So Rapid Turbine has been designed as a rapid application project to get something out. And my thinking is until we have produced something, we will not really understand what we are doing. So we have taken just one task – Trench digging and pipe installation- and are trying to produce an app.

So far we have hit two big issues. The first is the pedagogic approach. We want to go further than just producing information on how to do the task – even with nice video. The mobile app should stimulate not just interactivity  but activity in the work process. And of course there are many real life artefacts which are used in that activity.

The second issue is establishing a workflow. Ultimately our aim is that our colleagues from Bau ABC will be able to produce the learning materials themselves. So far our workflow is fourfold. Firstly we are producing wireframes. Although we have used Balsamic in teh past, at the moment our designers, Owen Gray and Martina Luebbing are preferring to work on flipchart paper. then we need to generate the HTML, CSS, Javascrtipt etc. for the app. This we plan to do using Twitter Bootstrap and an html editor. And then we will use the Tribal m-Learning program to produce the App.

So far so good. We are still at the wireframe stage. I will update you on how it all goes.

Reflect is a free Android App for phones and tablets developed by students from Hochschule Karlsruhe (Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences) for Pontydysgu as part of the Learning Layers Project.

The app is presently in closed beta but will be open for use by everyone in August 2013. If you would like more details please email graham10 [at] mac [dot] com.

We demoed the App at a workshop jointly hosted by the UK National Health Service developers network Handi and the Learning Layers project in Bradford last month and share here the report we produced on the feedback.

Aim:

• To elicit user feedback from developers and healthcare professionals
• Evaluate potential of the App
  

Background and Key Idea:

The original idea came from talking with a doctor in the UK at a Learning layers workshop. He explained how little time he had to reflect on his ongoing learning. The most time he had, he told us, was when he was in his car between meetings and visiting patients.

The Reflect App was originally designed to make the recording of learning, both formal and informal, easy.

The App is voice controlled and translates voice recordings into text.

Users can build a ‘stack’ of questions by typing them into a simple form on a web interface. Then they can use an Android Phone App which reads them the questions. They can skip to the next question, resubmit their answer or ask for help. The answers are automatically converted to text and can be downloaded to their own computer or tablet.

What we hoped to learn:

We were concerned to get feedback about:

a)    The general idea and potential interest in the app

b)    Usability and UI

c)    Ideas for further development

Feedback from developers and healthcare professionals:

Negative feedback:

• GPs are concerned about the level of security, regarding sensitive data.
• Developers were concerned about quality of voice recognition and difficulties with background noise

Questions that were raised:

• What is the maximum recording time?
• Where does the voice recognition processing take place?
• Is an off-line mode possible?
• could Reflect be integrated into other systems (e.g. NHS)
• What are business models for future sustainability?

Positive feedback and further potential:

• Reflect could be a good tool to report back the first impressions on meetings
• A future approach could be to develop an APi to allow use with other systems
• Domains for groups to work together
• Reflect could be used for research purposes e.g surveys
• Learning tasks could be created for students (microanalysis)
• Link to Evernote
• Reflect provides strong support for scaffolding learning

Suggested Business Models:

• Advertising
• Premium domain accounts
• Develop market ins tacks of questions for different occupations / domain and license under revenue sharing model

What Next?

We are continuing to test the App on a closed beta and are working on an open beta release for Reflect.

We are hoping to get further developer support for:

a)    Exploring off line potential

b)    Developing a API

c)    Porting to iOS

Evaluation of the activity:

From our point of view we were delighted with the critical and positive feedback. We especially noted the concern from external developers that there is a strong business model and suggest that this should be noted by other Learning layers development teams / design groups.

The workshop was very well organised. Whilst it would have been useful to have more health care professionals, the opportunity for engagement with so many developers and with commercial companies was extremely valuable.

This week is my favourite annual conference – the Personal Learning Environments Conference. And tomorrow I am off to Berlin, where the conference is being held at the Beuth University. The deadline for full papers was last weekend – so I am might relieved to have at least got a first draft of it out by today. It is co-authored with my colleagues Ludger Deitmer and Lars Heinemann from the University of Bremen and is based on work we are doing under the Learning layers project, seeking to develop and up-scale the use of apps for informal learning in the construction and health sectors. The paper focuses on the nature of knowledge used within work processes – what we call work process knowledge and how we can develop co-design processes to support work based learning.

The introduction is posted below and you can download a PDF copy of the full paper.

Introduction

While Technology Enhanced learning (TEL), Personal Learning Environments and the use of mobile devices have been suggested as a means to address the challenge of supporting learning at the workplace, their potential has not yet been fully realized. Despite much theoretical research in the use of mobile devices for work based learning there are still few compelling example of effective practice. Where there are case studies of both mobile devices and PLEs supporting work based learning, these tend to remain isolated with limitations on upscaling or wider adoption.

A critical review of the way information technologies are being used for workplace learning (Kraiger, 2008) concluded that most solutions are targeted towards a learning model based on the idea of direct instruction. TEL initiatives tend to be based upon a traditional business training model transferred from face to face interactions to onscreen interactions, but retaining the standard trainer / learner relationship and a reliance on formal and to some extent standardized course material and curricula.

However research suggests that (not only) in SMEs much learning takes place in the workplace and through work processes, is multi episodic, is often informal, is problem based and takes place on a just in time basis (Hart, 2011). Rather than a reliance on formal or designated trainers, much training and learning involves the passing on of skills and knowledge from skilled workers (Attwell and Baumgartl, 2009). In other words, learning is highly individualized and heavily integrated with contextual work practices.

In the past few years, emerging technologies (such as mobile devices or social networks) have rapidly spread into all areas of our life. However, while employees in SMEs increasingly use these technologies for private purposes and to a lesser extent for information seeking and informal learning, enterprises have not generally recognized the potential of such technologies for supporting learning.

As a consequence, the use of these emerging technologies and support for Personal Learning Environments have not been systematically taken up as a sustainable learning strategy that is integrated with other forms of learning at the workplace.

The academic world has. perhaps unsurprisingly, been somewhat slow to respond to the challenge of recognising different sources of knowledge. A little strangely, one important step in developing recognition of different forms of scholarly research and knowledge is the development and use of forms of citation.

Si in that regard it is encouraging to see the publication of “The Amsterdam Manifesto on Data Citation Principles.”

In the preface they state:

We wish to promote best practices in data citation to facilitate access to data sets and to enable attribution and reward for those who publish data. Through formal data citation, the contributions to science by those that share their data will be recognized and potentially rewarded. To that end, we propose that:

1. Data should be considered citable products of research.

2. Such data should be held in persistent public repositories.

3. If a publication is based on data not included with the article, those data should be cited in the publication.

4. A data citation in a publication should resemble a bibliographic citation and be located in the publication’s reference list.

5. Such a data citation should include a unique persistent identifier (a DataCite DOI recommended, or other persistent identifiers already in use within the community).

6. The identifier should resolve to a page that either provides direct access to the data or information concerning its accessibility. Ideally, that landing page should be machine-actionable to promote interoperability of the data.

7. If the data are available in different versions, the identifier should provide a method to access the previous or related versions.

8. Data citation should facilitate attribution of credit to all contributors

The Manifesto was created during the Beyond the PDF 2 Conference in Amsterdam in March 2013.

The original authors were Mercè Crosas, Todd Carpenter, David Shotton and Christine Borgman.