As i have indicated earlier, the Learning Layers (LL) project is preparing itself for the Design Conference of the Year 3. This time the venue is the main Campus of the Aalto University in Espoo, next to Helsinki. This gives a chance to compare our current situation in the project with the one two years ago, when we had the Year 1 Design Conference in the Arabia Campus of the Aalto University in Helsinki. Here some thoughts of the changes between the early days and the current phase of our project.

1. What has happened in the fieldwork?

When preparing ourselves for the Y1 Design Conference we were in a very initial stage with our fieldwork, Speaking for our part – the work with the Construction sector in North Germany – we had only manged to complete in a rapid tempo the first round of stakeholder interviews and draft initial User Stories in Bau-ABC, in the Agentur and in some craft trade companies. Based on this, we organised the Application Partner Day visits in Bau-ABC and in Agentur to see the huge training area of the training centre and to see the construction site of the merging exhibition building. Altogether, we could at best destill some design issues but we were not sure, to what directions the project could move.

Now, two years later, we see that we worked out the ways forward to participative design processes, to progressive tool development and to promising pilot concepts. In the construction sector this has required several iterations and modifications of the initial design ideas but we have kept the processes going on. In Bau-ABC we have had several series of co-design workshops, capacity building workshops and stakeholder engagement events that have brought us forward. With Agentur we have had somewhat different process dynamic but nevertheless the impulses we have got from different encounters and partcipative events have pushed our tool development further as well.

2. How have we found the way to design ideas?

Looking back, we did not necessarily anticipate in the Y1 Design Conference workshops that the four parallel round tables would produce The Design Ideas and The Design Teams for the next one year plus perhaps longer. At that point we just seemed to be working with some exemplary needs raised by our application partners and tried to look for design processes that could respond to them. The dynamic of the event nevertheless gave the results of these parallel group processes a higher status than we may have expected. Moreover, when we started giving catchy names for the Design Ideas and creating a collective identity for the teams to continue, we had shaped the project in a new way.

So, we came out of Y1 Design Conference regrouped into four parallel Design Teams with more or less sectoral focus and perspective to tool development for particular needs:

• “Sharing Turbine” based on the idea of digitising the instruction and learning materials of Bau-ABC (“the White Folder“) into digital learning resource to be shared and used across learning venues (training centre, company and vocational school);
• “Captus” based on the idea to support the “Learning exhibition” of the Agentur for ecological construction work with the help of tools that capture knowledge and support experience-based learning in informal contexts;
• “Pandora” based on the idea to work with local and regional interpretation of healthcare sector guidelines and support reflection on training contents and mutual advice in problem cases;
• “Bits and Pieces” based on the idea to support real-time documentation and archiving of episodes and instances of learning, sensemaking on these elements and rearranging the them for further reflection (based on the original example of medical doctors archiving paper notes into cardboard boxes for further reflection).

Now, coming back to the current situation, we have clearly come out of these rather particularistic groupings and moved towards more scalable sets of tools and implementation scenarios.

3. How have we proceeded with co-design, tool development and piloting?

Here it is possible to give only rough outlines of the dynamic, iterative and reorienting processes that had led to the current sets of tools, frameworks and services with which we are working. In a nutshell they can be characterised in the following ways:

• The design process that was started as digitisation of instruction and learning materials (the White Folder) got transformed into shaping of a framework (“the Learning Toolbox”) to manage mobile apps and tools for working and learning processes. Parallel to this the Multimedia Training helped the trainers to create domain-specific blogs for delivering instruction materials and learning resources. These are hosted by the common platform “Baubildung.net”.
• The design process that was started as specific support for the forthcoming exhibition turned into more general piloting with video annotation tools and augmented reality. For some of these pilots alternative fields and counterparts were found from other contexts.
• The initial design idea of “Pandora” was differentiated into development of parallel tools, apps and services (“Living Documents”, “Reflect App”, “Help Seeking”). Whilst these were firstly, developed and piloted in different contexts in the same pilot region, the current work is bringing them closer to each other.
• The work with “Bits and Pieces” has focused on different aspects and phases of the collection, sensemaking and reinterpretation processes with particular tools and software solutions . The current phase is looking for integrative approach (with links to other LL tools).

I leave my comparisons here. I may have given a somewhat idealised picture of the more complex and ‘messy’ process in which we have been working our ways forward. Yet, I believe that this picture helps to see from where we are coming and via what kind of efforts. Now we are gathering to take further steps ahead.

More blogs to come …

Some time ago we received the sad news that David Raffe, professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Edinburgh had died unexpectedly. For us David was a colleague who had been very strongly present during the early years of the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) and the early phase of the VETNET network (for research in Vocational Education and Training). Also, many of us had worked together with him in European projects and conferences. For us he was not just one of the colleagues but a person from whom we learned a lot in many respects. Therefore, it is appropriate stop for a moment to remember David.

We have already prepared a joint text in the name of the VETNET network and sent it to the University of Edinburgh to be included in their condolence book and we have sent it out via the VETNET mailing list. In this process the veterans of VETNET who had known David for years (like Sabine, Johanna, Martin, Graham and Karen) shared views with those who joined VETNET later and had less chances get acquainted with him. We all were hit by the news and we felt that we want to share our memories with the community. During this process several personal memories came to my mind. Here I would like to share some of them shortly.

My first encounter with David was at the pilot-ECER in Enschede, the Netherlands, in June 1992. I was participating as a relatively young researcher, just entering the European arenas. David was there as a well-known scholar and as one of the keynote speakers of the whole conference. He put into discussion the issue :”Is modularisation becoming a common currency in European education and training?” I still remember the way he started to explore different concepts of flexibility that were attached to modularisation as well as different prospects for progression and growth of knowledge. He also drew our attention to main effects and side effects of reforms and alerted us of one-sided views (affirmation vs. rejection). Altogether, he gave us a lesson, how to avoid easy answers and how to get deeper into the complexity of reform processes.

Later on I had the chance to observe the work of a European project (“Post-16 strategies”) in which England and Scotland were participating as different countries. This project avoided the pitfall of getting different systems into competition with each other. Instead, the partners tried to identify, what kind of strategies for promoting parity of esteem (between general and vocational learning) have success chances in their countries – and how they can learn from each other. To me it was striking that the ‘big names’ assembled in this project accepted the role of contributors instead of claiming the leadership for themselves. Here, David was a good contributor. As an annexed event I had the chance to witness a session of an Anglo-Scottish comparative project in which English and Scottish researchers were in genuine dialogue on recent developments in their respective countries.

A third memory is related to my former employer Cedefop (European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training) shortly after it had moved from Berlin to Thessaloniki. Cedefop was in the process of new start and repositioning and was re-establishing its contacts to different stakeholders. The Management Board had a special session in which Commissioner Edith Cresson was attending. David was invited as a representative of the research community to discuss the development policies in vocational education and training (VET) and the role of Cedefop. To me it seemed that David’s speech was very helpful in creating an air of listening to and learning from research (rather than assigning researchers as sub-contractors to promote given policy priorities).

Later on we realised that David was putting priority on working in Scotland – or on comparisons between England & Wales, Scotland, North Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Here again, he could surprise us with findings on unexpected diversity – brought together with common language and seemingly common vocabulary.

Now that we have shared the news of David’s death we have received several reactions from colleagues of old from different parts of Europe – Alan from England, Eduardo from Portugal, Georg from Germany, Jose Luis from Spain, Sören from Denmark … We all have come together with our thoughts to remember David and to respect his life work.

Rest in peace, David

My recent posts have been reports on my efforts to catch up with debates in EdTech communities and with recent pilots with MOOCs. I made use of a relatively quiet period in our work for the Learning Layers (LL) project to read what Graham Attwell has recently written on these issues. (With quiet I don’t mean that we would have had nothing to do. My point was that we have been more occupied with preparatory tasks – not much to blog about them.)

Now it seems that I have to move on to the actual preparation of the forthcoming Design Conference. Therefore, I have to postpone my further reading to some other time. At this point I make only few comments and notes for myself what to read next.

1. Changing concepts – changing perspectives

It strikes me that in the long run several changes in terminology in EdTech (and before EdTech became a big number) have paved the way from teaching-centred to learning-oriented approaches. Just thinking the changes from ‘distance teaching’ to ‘distance learning’, ‘remote learning’ and finally to ‘open distance learning’. In the beginning phase ‘eLearning’ was hyped as an alternative paradigm – the new promising mainstream to push into periphery the traditional academic teaching and learning culture. Gradually the initiatives with ‘eLearning in practice’ have brought into picture far more realistic approaches (with emphasis on technology enhanced learning TEL).

A similar transition seems to have taken place in the debates on Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) vs. Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). As Graham put it a quote that I have picked from his earlier blog: “At a development level, there is little point in trying to develop a new PLE to replace the VLE. Instead we need to provide flexible tools which can enhance existing technologies and learning provision, be it formal courses and curricula or informal learning in the workplace or in the community.”

To me, the above repeated quote might be also the key to understand adequately the potential of MOOCs. I have the impression that the early phase of the MOOCs has been misused or misinterpreted to create a picture of a renaissance of e-teaching (by global missionaries) in the form of massively open online courses. What I see coming up in the newer blogs is increasingly a picture of scalable learning opportunities via which professional communities reach new dimensions. If I have understood it correctly, the initiative LangMOOC is looking for opportunities to develop language support practices for transnational cooperation activities. To me, the pilots in the employment services point to a similar direction. But I am eager to learn from those who are involved.

2. What should I/we look more closely

Even with the risk that I will not have that much time I will list some blog articles that I should try to go through in the coming time. I have sadly neglected a most valuable resource – the blog Wilfred Rubens over Technology Enhanced Learning – but with these issues I must catch up with some topics. My priority issues will be the following ones (published quite recently but to the very point I want to catch up with):

Vormen van e-learning (February 25th 2015)

Here Wilfred gives a differentiated view on different forms of e-learning (I think he identifies 11 variants).

Nieuwe EMMA MOOCS van start #EUMOOCS (February 27th 2015)

Here Wilfred gives insights into European cooperation intiatives to develop MOOCs.

Hoe lerenden binnen MOOCS opereren? (March 2nd 2015)

Here Wilfred reports on a study that has analysed the activities of learners of MOOCs.

So let us see when I get to deepen my understanding of MOOCs and similar learning arrangements that transform the perspective from ‘courses’ to social learning in professional communities.

More blogs to come …