Sustaining learning
I am in Tallinn in Estonia experiencing an early reminder of how cold and wet north European winters can be. I am here for a consortium meeting of the EU sponsored Learning layers project. Consortium meetings in these large projects can have a considerable number of participants, some 50 researchers and application partners attended the last meeting in Bad Zwischenahn in Germany.
Tomorrow am am helping organise a two and half hour workshop with the perhaps not particualrly sexy title of Sustainability, Scalability & Replicability. Whats it all about? The problem is that far too many projects – esepcially in the area of technology enhanced learning – fail to develop finished products. And even those that do usually fail to get ream traction around such products let alone work out how to sustain the development. We don’t want that to happen with Learning layers. We think we are well on the way to developing tools which can support informal learning and provide learning support to thousands of people in the workplace. But of course there are issues. We do not have the money to do everything we want to. Sometimes our software designs seem hopelessly ambitious. And the research universities in the project may not have any interest in trying to sustain product development, once EU funding for research has ended.
So those are the issues we want to explore in the workshop looking at the progression from a research project to a full product, working out who are the stakeholders and developing an initial business pitch for how future development can be sustained. Watch this blog for what we discover.
As usual, Graham exaggerates about the weather – it was all typical Baltic Sea coastal town autumn weather we experienced in Tallinn. The real Nordic winter is something like the LL project experienced in its Design Conference 2013 in Helsinki.
But makes valid points when he characterises the importance of the workshop we had in Tallinn. I have already reported of my experiences (with that workshop and the whole meeting) in the neighbouring blog “Working & Learning” on this Pontydysgu site. We would like to hear other views as well, aren’t we?