If you are interested in the ideas behind my presentation at Online Educa Berlin, I have written several papers around the theme of Web 2.0 and Personal Learning Environments.

One was posted in a previous entry on the Wales Wide Web here.

A more in depth exposition of the ideas is contained in a paper called ‘E-Learning und die soziale Gestaltung der Technik’ – “e-Learning and the Social Shaping of Technology”. I am trying to find an English version of this paper. for those of you who can read German here is the introduction to the paper and a link to a download for the full paper.

Der Diskurs um die “Wissensgesellschaft”, so wie er seit mittlerweile vier Jahrzehnten in der wissenschaftlichen Öffentlichkeit geführt wird, war von Beginn an mit technikoptimistischen Annahmen verknüpft. Dabei haben in der Frühphase des Wissensgesellschaftsdiskurses die Sozialwissenschaften und die technisch ausgerichteten Wissenschaften wie Ingenieurswissenschaften oder Maschinenbau eine zentrale Rolle gespielt (Bell 1973). Während die technischen Anwendungswissenschaften mühelos nahezu jede Idee in die Praxis umzusetzen schienen, versprach man sich von den Sozialwissenschaften die Expertise, Gesamtgesellschaften so effizient steuern und planen zu können, dass selbst die kapitalistische oder real-sozialistische Verfasstheit der sozialen Einheiten eine untergeordnete Rolle spielte (Richta & Kollektiv 1972; Touraine 1972). Dieser technikoptimistische Zug hat sich bis heute gehalten, allerdings in stark modifizierter Form. Es sind nunmehr weniger die Wissenschaften selbst als die Potenziale der technisch vermittelten Medien, die die Fortschrittsprojektionen nachhaltig anregen. Eine überragende Bedeutung besitzt die Schlüsseltechnologie Computer im Zusammenhang mit dem Medium Internet. In dem vorliegenden Beitrag soll es um eine besondere Variante der Fortschrittsprojektionen gehen, die mit dem Computer und dem Internet verbunden werden: um das elektronisch gestützte oder elektronisch basierte Lernen, das so genannte E-Learning.
E-Learning ist eine relativ neue Technologie, und daher steckt auch die wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit diesem Thema noch in den Kinderschuhen. Dennoch gibt es mittlerweile eine umfangreiche Literatur zum Thema, und Lernen mittels neuer Medien wird zunehmend als eigenständige Disziplin anerkannt. Die überwältigende Mehrheit der einschlägigen Studien, und zwar sowohl die affirmativen/optimistischen wie die skeptischen, ist jedoch, bezogen auf die Technologie selbst, deterministisch, d.h. befasst sich nur mit deren Potentialen und Auswirkungen auf Bildung und Lernen, anstatt auch umgekehrt die Einflüsse des Lernens und Lehrens auf die Technik ins Auge zu fassen.

Der vorliegende Aufsatz geht von der Annahme aus, dass sowohl die Technologien selbst als auch ihre Anwendungen durch politische und soziale Prozesse geformt werden. Wenn Lernen ein sozialer Prozess ist, dann muss jede Überlegung über die Entwicklung und die Auswirkungen des E-Learning und seiner Technologien auch die sozialen, ökonomischen und kulturellen Prozesse und Diskurse mit einbeziehen, welche an der Entwicklung und Implementierung der neuen Technologien im Bildungsprozess beteiligt sind.

Dieser Aufsatzgeht davon aus, dass drei dominante Diskurse die Entwicklung und Implementierung des E-Learning geprägt haben, nämlich zunehmende Warenförmigkeit und Privatisierung von Bildung sowie drittens ein verkürzter Diskurs über lebenslanges Lernen, welche ihrerseits wieder auf allgemeineren Diskursen rund um Globalisierung und die Privatisierung des Wissens basieren.
Der Artikel beinhaltet zum einen eine Auseinandersetzung mit verschiedenen Konzepten des E-learning, aber auch mit Konzepten des informellen Lernens, so wie sie sich im Diskurs über E-learning finden lassen. Ferner wird auf Ergebnisse empirischer Forschung zurückgegriffen, die im Rahmen internationaler, EU-finanzierter Projekte erfolgte. Diese Diskurse werden im folgenden nachgezeichnet um anschließend an einigen Beispielen zu zeigen,wie sie die Entwicklung und Anwendung von E-Learning-Technologien in den jeweiligen Anwendungsfeldern beeinflußt haben.
Die Entwicklung des Kapitalismus und kapitalistischer Gesellschaften jedoch stellt sich widersprüchlich dar, nämlich als dialektischer Entwicklungsprozess und als (Klassen-)Kampf. Obwohl also bestimmte Diskurse die derzeitige Periode des Kapitalismus sehr wohl dominieren und auch die Entwicklung der E-Learning-Technologien geprägt haben, gibt es alternative und widersprüchliche Trends. Einige Kommentatoren verweisen etwa auf das E-Learning als eine Technologie mit potentieller (sozialer) Sprengkraft. Außerdem mehren sich die Hinweise darauf, dass die Lernenden selber die Technologien in anderer Weise und für andere Zwecke als die ursprünglich vorgesehenen benutzen. Zur Illustration dieser Entwicklung werde ich auf die Ergebnisse einer von der EU-Kommission finanzierten Studie über den Gebrauch von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien beim Lernen in kleinen und mittleren Unternehmen zurückgreifen. Abschließend wird der Aufsatz der Frage nachgehen, wie sich diese neuen Gebrauchsweisen von Technologie auf Bildung im digitalen Zeitalter und Möglichkeiten des Engagements in einer zivilen Gesellschaft auswirken könnten.

E-Learning und die soziale Gestaltung der Technik

Been meaning to blog about this for some time. Jenny Hughes forwarded me the link today so I have finally got round to it.

Why is the Scottish Chartered Teacher scheme so interesting.

Firstly it recognises that teachers can develop their career without leaving the classroom. In other words it values the activities of being a teacher, rather than in most systems where career advancement is based on becoming a manager.

Secondly it introduces a framework for Continuing Professional Development, based on professional values and personal commitments.

Perhaps most important is the the Chartered Teacher qualification is based largely on reflective learning and self evaluation.

The Standard has four key components:

a. professional values and personal commitments;
b. professional knowledge and understanding;
c. professional and personal attributes;
d. professional action.

The basic assumption is that the Chartered Teacher is characterised by four central professional values and personal commitments:

a. effectiveness in promoting learning in the classroom;
b. critical self-evaluation and development;
c. collaboration and influence;
d. educational and social values.

You can find out more about the Chartered Teacher Scheme on the Scottish Government’s Standard for Chartered Teachers web site.

The issue of digital literacy will not go away. And it reappears in strange forms. Every six months or so there is a surge of posts on teh Becata research list serve suggesting all kids should be taught to touch type. Fair enough – if I could type properly it would save me a lot of time in correcting errors. But I don’t really see the keyboard lasting much longer as the main form of talking to a computer.

Anyway, it has always seemed to me that one of the big challenges arising from the idea of digital literacy is the curriculum. I am quite bemused by curricula in general. Whatever research we undertake, whatever needs we show, the development of curricula seems to go on in a seperate and parallel universe. There was one project that I evaluated which greatly impressed me. Martin Owen was one of the project partners and his guest blog on this page earlier this week reminded me of the project. It was called i-Curriculum and it set out to research and develop guidelines for curricula for developing digital literacy. At least that is what I think the project was about. The official European project blurb says:

“The I-Curriculum framework is a set of guidelines that can be used by policy makers, teachers and other educators, the producers of digital resources, and students to check whether a project or lesson achieves the goal of enabling active participation in lifelong learning practices. This framework could help in the examination of current curriculum and learning design, locating the process within the demands of changing cultures and mapping educational provision onto the new demands of new contexts in which life, work and education interact.”

Central to the project is the framework.

“The framework represents a shift away from the notion of key skills. It looks at an activity as developing various skills related to digital literacies, the areas are:

• exchanging and sharing information; communication and collaboration
• researching: finding things out
• modelling
• working practices and attitudes.

Across each of these skill areas are three levels of curriculum activity:

The Operational Curriculum is learning to use the tools and technology effectively. Knowing how to word-process, how to edit a picture, enter data and make simple queries of an information system, save and load files and so on.

The Integrating Curriculum is where the uses of technology are applied to current curricula and organisation of teaching and learning. This might be using an online library of visual material, using a virtual learning environment to deliver a course or part of a
course. The nature of the subject and institution of learning is essentially the same, but technology is used for efficiency, motivation and effectiveness.

The Transformational Curriculum is based on the notion that what we might know, and how and when we come to know it has changed by the existence of the technologies we use and therefore the curriculum and organisation of teaching and learning needs to change
to reflect those changes.

There is implied inclusion of levels along the axis, but it is not the case that you need to study in an operational way before you become transformational. There is a real danger in making that assumption. If you start from the position that you are going to be transformational or integrative then you do not approach the acquisition of operational skills in the same way. If the curriculum is viewed in such a way that competence operations in themselves are the learning outcomes then teaching can be fairly mechanical – however, if the curriculum is designed to be transformational, the acquisition of the operational skills is needs driven,
intrinsic, secure in a model of transferability and almost taken-for-granted.”

If you are interested, FutureLab have a web page giving access to the final report. The report contains the following sections
Background – this section defines what is meant by digital literacy skills in this document, and how we can distinguish between levels of competency.

The framework – discusses the theoretical underpinnings of the matrix as well as presenting the matrix.

Case studies – three illustrative case studies taken from some of the partner countries that demonstrate how current practice can be considered using the framework as an assessment tool.

Conclusions and recommendations – this summarises the findings and recommendations for the EU with respect to the development of digital literacy skills.

The project web site also provides access to many of the projects working documents. Some of these are avaiable in Greek, Spanish and German, as well as English.

I have been trying to reorganize my feedreader and picked up this post from June from Jeremy Herbert’s Headspace blog. It quotes a post by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen about what he seeks in new hires:

DRIVE: “First, drive. I define drive as self-motivation — people who will walk right through brick walls, on their own power, without having to be asked, to achieve whatever goal is in front of them. People with drive push and push and push and push and push until they succeed.”

CURIOSITY: “Second criterion: curiosity. Curiosity is a proxy for, do you love what you do? Anyone who loves what they do is inherently intensely curious about their field, their profession, their craft. They read about it, study it, talk to other people about it… immerse themselves in it, continuously. And work like hell to stay current in it. Not because they have to. But because they love to.

ETHICS: “Third and final criterion: ethics. Ethics are hard to test for. But watch for any whiff of less than stellar ethics in any candidate’s background or references. And avoid, avoid, avoid. Unethical people are unethical by nature, and the odds of a metaphorical jailhouse conversion are quite low.”

I think this is interesting and would agree with much of it but it raises some questions. Firstly, I would add a fourth category:

“COLLABORATION. The fourth criteria is collaboration. The ability to work with others is a critical source of learning. Even more so the ability to collaborate is central to developing and sharing knowledge. Collaboration leads to informal learning, innovation and productivity. Collaboration includes listening and valuing other peoples opinions as much as putting forward one’s own.”

The problem is that even if new pedagogic approaches involve curiosity and collaboration for learning, when we seek to assess and certificate competences, these are not qualities we value.

Is it possible to develop new forms of assessment that value drive, curiosity, ethics and collaboration? Is it even desirable that we seek to measure such things? What is the relation between our measurement of general educational learning or vocational skills and knowledge and what might be called the soft skills highlighted by Marc Andreessen.

Technorati Tags: competence development, assessment

On a long trip around Romania and Poland – hence few opportunities to post here in the last few days. But, I have met many wonderful people and will come away with much to think about.

On Saturday I spoke at a seminar attended by the leaders of the Romanian students movement. Hope very much we will continue to keep in touch.

Monday I was in Constanta where I helped with a case study being undertaken as part of the European commission funded TT Plus project. The TT Plus project is looking at the changing roles and responsibilities of trainers. It is coordinated by my organisation, Pontydysgu, and has partners in six different European countries.

What makes the project especially interesting is that we are trying to develop new methodologies for comparative research. The main paradigm of comparative research, in education in Europe at least, has been to compare national studies – be it through surveys or case studies . We have borrowed from the computer world and are instead attempting to identify scenarios of practice and use cases (although these terms are difficult to define).

We are focusing not on functions and roles but on actual practice in providing training – whether or not the person is called a trainer. And we are attempting to look at practice from the perspective of different actors – including the trainer, managers and learners.

Rather than compare national studies we wish to identify different patterns in the scenarios of practice and use cases. Of course, practice will reflect national cultures. But we expect more in common between  scenarios of practice than differences based on country.

The scenarios of practice are based on case studies which is how I came to be in a cement factory in Constanta on Monday. Very interesting it was too. I will post the results fo the case study as soon as it is finished. For the moment, though, I just wanted to say a few comments about innovation. The cement factory, along with much of the industrial base in Romania, is old and in desperate need of investment. Much of the plant and machinery dates form the 1960s. If it was in the UK it would almost certainly be closed down on health and safety grounds – and in fact it is planned to relocate the plant outside Constanta because of new environmental regulations.

Not an obvious candidate for an innovation reward? Little modern technology. Basic products. But the innovation in maintaining and keeping such plant running is truly impressive. Monday I was talking to Paul, who used to be a ships engineer. He was telling me Romanian engineers were always on demand on cargo ships because they could mend anything. If a pump failed a British or German engineer would merely radio for a new one to be flown to the next port of call. The Romanians would fix the pump on the fly.

And such a tradition of innovation seems much closer to the ideas behind Web 2.0. We do not want shiny out of the box software – or even beautiful bespoke applications. Instead we need the electronic equivalent of the Romanian engineer, able to take what is available and make it work – hopefully adding value in the process. Such skills are very close to what John Seeely Brown has called bricolage.. Bricolage relates to the concrete and has to do with the ability to find something – an object or a tool, a piece of code, a document – and to use it in a new way and in a new context. This is exactly what is happening in the pre-digital world of the Constanta cement factory.

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In the paper I published on the site last week, I talked about the present system of assessment being a barrier to the introduction of e-Portfolios and pedagogic innovation. I cited Richard Stiggins  who distinguishes between assessment for learning and assessment of learning.

There is no doubt which paradigm the UK follows. An article in todays Observer newspaper highlights the increasing problem of exma related stress for school students. “Unprecedented numbers of psychologists are now having to help pupils deal with the emotional strain – which can lead to sleepless nights, eating disorders and other illnesses”, they say.

The artcile goes on to say that Place2Be – a charity offering emotional support to primary school children – has seen a massive increase in the numbers of pupils approaching counsellors about exams.

“The charity runs a project called Place2Talk in 113 schools where children can post requests to see a counsellor into postboxes placed in the school buildings. So far 70 per cent of the children in the schools have asked for support.

Sheridan Whitfield, a manager for the charity in London, said children from the age of five were able to place requests for a chat into postboxes placed in the school. ‘Children are accessing it more for exam worries.’

The relentless pressure means psychologists are being called into schools at an increasing rate, according to Hill: ‘We are doing this in a way that we were not doing it five years ago.””

This is ridiculous. It has nothing to do with education and learning. We need a concerted effort to develop and implement new forms of assessment – including self assessment, group assessment and peer assessment. We need to develop ideas about authentic assessment – where the process of work itself, rather than the endlessly spiraling test regime.

I am much taken by a comment by Scott last week: “…we have entered an era of connected media. Connected media does not contain interaction; instead content items are nodes in a network of connections that are the focus of interaction. The content is inside-out. The hot content today is not interactive – Flickr/Photobucket, YouTube, iTunes, RSS feeds all feature non-interactive content, yet the content is highly connected via layers of interlinked metadata (del.icio.us, technorati, recommendations, hyperlinks, comments…).”

Of course he is right. And it is pretty easy to understand the implications in terms of how we work and learn and in how we develop e-learning content. It is less easy to work out how it effects how we report on our work. On the one hand our work will not be in one place – it will be scattered across different media and on different web sites. Last year we started looking at some of the implications of this in a seminar called ‘How Dude, where’s my Data‘. NB I have finally got together a wiki documenting at least some of the outcomes of that seminar.

But students are still assessed largely on the outcome of their learning and in terms of their competence. Not – here are my connections – but here is something I have done and here is something I claim I can do. This is far less easy to document in terms of network nodes.

It may be that the e-Portfolios of the future will have to be based far more on process than merely outcomes – more here is something I claim I am competent to do and here is the interactions I have made which allows me to say this – rather than here is a thing I have made which allows me to claim I am competent.

I still feel that competence is a difficult concept pedagogically and am worried that educational technologists will see competence as a mere unproblematic taxonomy. This matters. If we are to develop and implement e-Portfolios – let alone Personal Learning environments – we have to get clear on these issues.

In the discussions I am having over e-Portfolios there is increasing agreement of the use of blogging type applications as a way of recording learning progress. There is also an awareness of the power of personal networks for peer feedback as an aid to reflection. BUT – and it is a big but – institutions and e-Portfolio providers still (naturally) want some way of representing achievement. How can we do this dynamically? Perhaps competence looks more like a tag cloud or a mind map than a ‘skills journal’.

I’m increasing interested in exploring the use of social software for competence development. Of course i know of the problem in developing and agreeing on definitions. I like Sebastian Fiedler’s and Barbara Kieslinger’s assertion that:

…the concept of competence is a theoretical construct that refers to a human potentiality for action or its underlying dispositions.

Competencies acquisition and advancement

Why is this discussion so important? We are increasingly using social software for learning and knowledge development in dispersed communities if practice. But we have problems in understanding the relationship between ‘subject’ based knowledge and competence as applied knowledge and between collective knowledge inherent within the communities if practice and the abilities or capabilities of individuals to use and apply such knowledge.

And I have written before of my worry that techies will see this as a trivial issue only requiring the construction of a simple (probably learning objective based) taxonomy.

Anyway I have developed a proposal for a symposium at the European Conference on Educational research in Ghent this September. The overview for the proposal follows.

Learners are discovering new uses of the technology for learning including instant messaging, file sharing, social networking and  blogging. A growing number of reports have documented how the so called net generation use computers in their everyday life.  As so often happens when confronted with something new, the reaction of the education systems is to control and to restrict it. Young people are told to turn off their mobile phones to go into their lessons on communication! The US government is debating a law banning access to social networking sites in educational establishments.

Of course it could be asked what this has to do with learning? To a large extent it depend on definitions of learning. If we say that learning is an activity which takes place within an institution and guided by qualified teachers, then of course it has little relationship. But if we take a wider definition of learning as purposeful activity which leads to changes if behaviour, then a great deal of learning is taking place.

But it is not just the appeal of communication which is drawing young people to these technologies. It is the ability to create, to share ideas,  to join groups, to publish – to create their own identities which constitute the power and the attraction of the Internet for young people.

The symposium will examine the use of social software for competence development.  Social software is used here in the meaning of software that lets people rendezvous, connect or collaborate by use of a computer network. It supports networks of people, content and services that are more adaptable and responsive to changing needs and goals. Social Software adapts to its environment, instead of requiring its environment to adapt to software. In this way social software is seen as overcoming “the absurd distinction between e-learning and knowledge management software” (Bryant, 2003).

Research  undertaken into the use of e-Learning in Small and Medium Enterprises has found little take up of formal courses. But there was widespread use of the Internet for informal learning, through searching, joining on-line groups and using email and bulletin boards. Google was the most popular application for learning. Age was not a factor.

The symposium which is based on work undertaken in different European projects is focused on research into practice int the use of social software in different contexts. The aim is to provide a rich picture of the different and changing ways in which people are using technology for learning with the aim of developing longer term implications of how new technologies can be used for competence development.

The paper by Graham Attwell and Ray Elferink present research into how social software can bring together different forms of learning for lifelong competence development. Sebastion Fiedler and Barbara Kiesinger look at the relation between domain specific teaching and comptencies in self directed learning. Alexandra Toedt examines how games based learning can develop competencies. Veronika Hornung explores the relevance of traditional educational research methods and concepts of didactical quality and whether they can be applied to the evaluation of technology enhanced learning scenarios. All the contributers will focus on different research methods and approaches for technology enhanced elearning.

The educational techies are getting interested in competence. Why? I’m not sure – I suspect it might be a funding thing.

But last week I was at an EU IST programme funded Ten Competence project meeting in Manchester. It was a pretty good conference with some thought provoking contributions. But i was fairly horrified at the lack of understanding of what competence was. It ranged from “well we aren’t really interested but we had to say we were to get the money’ to the ‘we found this thing called Blooms taxonomy – thats what all educationalists use’.

Now i am not particularly worried that people have different conceptions of competence (more on that in a moment). But i am seriously concerned if educational technologists and particularly systems designers think competence can easily be reduced to a simple hierarchically defined taxonomy. It reminds me of all those developers who claimed that their applications were pedagogically neutral.

One of the problems is that many of the education technology developers, in Europe at least, come from Higher Education. One of them actually said in manchester that the idea of competence in new in education. Well, new it might be for universities. But in vocational education and training we have been working with concepts about competence for many years,

Anyway, I am in Luxembourg at the moment for a review meeting of the IST programme iCamp project (I.m one of the reviewers). Although I must admit I don’t follow exactly what the project is trying to develop, it is very impressive in that it does have a strong pedagogic underpinning. And in the first project deliverable, by Sebastian Fiedler and Barbara Kieslinger (2006) I found an excellent discussion around the nature and meaning of competence.

“It is important to note”, they say,

that the concept of competence is a theoretical construct that refers to a human potentiality for action or its underlying dispositions. Theoretical constructs of this kind can, and indeed are, used for a variety of descriptive and/or explanatory purposes. This variability is clearly reflected in the current literature on competencies and its apparent lack of coherence and precision.

Competencies acquisition and advancement | iCamp

They go on to say:

Like the more traditional concept of ability, competence conceptualizations are generally referring to an individual’s potentiality for action in a range of challenging situations. It is thus a concept that foremost indicates a precondition for future problem solving and coping (including the use of adequate tools) in a particular area of action…….This is where the old notion of qualification that is based on requirements analysis oriented in the past and on the acquisition and performance of standardized procedural skills and factual knowledge clearly shows its limits.

Competencies acquisition and advancement | iCamp

The problem in their formulation seems to be that they divide the potentiality to act from subject based learning. In part that is just because of the problematic nature of the traditional taxonomies of learning based on subject disciplines and their increasing irrelevance to how we apply and structure knowledge in the modern world. Nevertheless it provides a good starting point for considering how competence might be encapsulated in learning software. I would contend that it cannot be codified through a hierarchical taxonomy, but rather requires the provision of tools to enable learners to themselves scaffold their learning and reflexively discover and describe their own competence.

Technorati Tags: e-learning

I read a lot of journal and conference papers – its part of my job. And just occasionally, you read one and think ‘wow, this is so cool’.

So, I am recommending the following paper to you – ‘Authenticity in Learning: Transactional Learning in Virtual Communities‘ by Karen Barton, Patricia McKellar and Paul Maharg.

The context for their work is law education but the ideas in the paper apply to any sphere of learning. The first part of the paper looks at the idea of authenticity. I was particularly taken by a quote from Barab, Squire & Dueber (2000) who say “authenticity lies ‘not in the learner, the task or the environment, but in the dynamic interactions among these various components […] authenticity is manifest in the flow itself, and is not an objective feature of any one component in isolation”.

They go on to describe the environment they have designed for providing simulations of legal practice.

They suggest that “if we focus on creating carefully-designed simulation tasks along the lines of what I shall call ‘transactional learning’ and create flexible, sensitive software instruments by which students can express themselves and carry out that task-based learning, then we become involved in creating an environment where students can begin to comprehend through active learning the complexity of a professional legal task or transaction.

They also define transactional learning based on their practice as:

• Transactional learning is active learning
  
  Transactional learning is based on doing legal transactions.
  
  Transactional learning involves reflection on learning.
  
  Transactional learning is based on collaborative learning.
  
  Transactional learning requires holistic or process learning.

Students work in groups of four, forming virtual legal companies. Particularly important is that assessment is based on the performance of the company, not of individual students, with members of the company responsible for agreeing on the work to be submitted.

The only slight disappointment with the paper is the conclusion, which talks about change management. I’m not saying change management is not important, but it doesn’t really fit with the rest of the paper.

Great stuff – make sure you read this. And thanks to Al Harris who forwarded me a copy.

Technorati Tags: e-learning, simulations