In my previous posting I promised that I would continue my reflections on the big picture of European research on vocational education and training (VET) with questions instead of presenting lengthy monologues. This is also easier to me: I do not need to have the answers – we have to find them together. This, of course raises the question: Who is interested in finding out what is happening to the European VET research?

Some colleagues may find it strange that I keep looking back at the earlier periods of European cooperation in VET research and the cultural changes that have happened in the recent times. Some colleagues may also find the the expression “change of cooperation climate” is rather strong. Why should I/we worry about the big picture? Or – to put it more stronger: why couldn’t we just keep on going with the day-to-day practice and move on to new challenges if something doesn’t work?

Somehow I cannot leave it at that. If we are going through a change in the European cooperation climate, this is not merely a matter of policy frameworks and programme structures to which we contribute. This is also a matter of our own practice – what kind of knowledge we are producing, with wshom and for what purpose. And, thinking about the role of European research communities and networks – what is their role in VET-related knowledge development?

Let us consider for the moment some recent developments in the European VET research. I take the liberty of using some of the catchwords of the “i-Europe” agenda but in a somewhat modified way. For the moment I am not proposing a common agenda based on allegedly shared research interests. Instead, I want to invite my colleagues to consider, what has happened with the interests of knowledge and related goal-settings in European VET research.

For this examination I propose the following key themes and related critical questions:

1. European integration: Has the interest to participate in European cooperation maintained its popularity among European VET researchers? Or are there new dividing lines that lead to a segmentation between different forms of European participation and between related knowledge processes?

2. Interdisciplinarity: Has the readiness to cross disciplinary boundaries and to work with interdisciplinary concepts and methodologies maintained its popularity across different project generations? Or do we experience new tendencies that strengthen academic core disciplines and push interdisciplinary wort in VET-related research to the margins?

3. Innovations: To what extent is VET research addressing the need for new innovations and studying emerging initiatives in the field of VET? Or has the interest to study new innovations led to shift of emphasis from the field of VET to slightly different areas of innovative practice (e.g. the strudies on personal learning environments or e-portfolios)?

4. Contextuality and intercultural exchanges: Is the cooperation of European VET researchers characterised by awareness of one’s own VET culture and readiness to learn from other cultures? Or are there new dividing lines that reduce the willingness to reflect upon one’s own VET culture and to familiarise with other VET cultures? Or are there new patterns of internationalisation that blur the culturally specific concepts in the field of VET in such a way that ‘learning from each other’ appears as anachronism?

5. Communities and networking: Are the experiences of VET researchers on European cooperation leading to stronger European research communities? Has the EU-funding for networks helped the VET researchers to overcome periods of discuontinuity and to promote the renewal of knowledge production? Or are there new dividing lines that reduce the interest in European community development and in VET-related European networking?

6. Interactivity and knowledge sharing via e-resources: Have the earlier pilot activities to promote interactive use of web and development of joint web-based knowledge resources led to sustainable practice? Has the familiarisation of VET researchers with Open Educational Resources (OER) and with Open Educational Contents (OEC) led to new forms cooperation between VET researchers and practitioners in the field of VET? Or are there cultural dividing lines that have not yet been overcome and therefore slow down the progress with interactivity and new media in the field of VET?

I think that I have posed enough questions for the moment. I am aware that the themes and the questions are rather abstract. Therefore, when examining the key themes in the light of questions I have give some examples that cast some light on my initial question: What has happened earlier and what is happening now? I wonder, when I will find the time to proceed. Maybe someone else has views on these issues …

It is already time for another edition of Sounds of the Bazaar.

This issue features a round table discussion with Jaan Netzow, from IBM Germany, Gareth Greenwood, IBM UK, and Bert de Coutere, IBM Belgium. All are involved in one way or another with the development, sales and support of software for collaboration – particularly in the workplace. Can IBM applications replace Facebook as a ‘managed social network?’ Should managers have the right to change employees’ personal profiles. All this and more in this round table.

The Sound of the Bazaar interview is with Rebecca Stromeyer. Rebecca has been involved with organising Online Educa Berlin since the start – in 1994. In the interview she tells of the origins of the conference and talks about what she enjoys about it all.

Website of the Month features the European Collaboration for Innovation project. And – this is a little embarassing – just at the moment we don’t have the url for the project to hand. But if you do want the url please visit us again when we have updated this page.

As ever thanks to Dirk Stieglitz – from stray hints in emails I gather that I made a mess of recording this issue and he had a bit of a technical struggle. And thanks to Beate Kleessen from ICWE for help in planning SoB this autumn and to Agnes Breitkopf from IBM for setting up the round table

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I would be delighted to host guest entries on the Wales Wide Web. I forgot to ask. But Martin Owen has emailed me saying: “I have been minded to write some things about 1994 for some time and I was prompted to write this. I think it might belong on Pontydysgu.” It certainly does, Martin. And I am honoured. Martin was one of the people who first got me hooked on technology and learning. you can read it here now. When I get the research pages sorted I will also add it there.

“I write this from a teacher’s perspective. I may write the story from a learner’s perspective later. It is a response to Graham’s piece of Nov 9th about the death of VLE’s.

This is a heresy in some circles – repositories of learning materials are not what the world needs. The idea that a teacher needs a mound of other people’s worksheets or powerpointlesses or yet –SCORM/IMS Learning Design structured learning objects is a figment of the imagination of deranged computer scientists and people who need tidy desks to remember where they put things.

I will say that having good access to some neat stuff (like a well drawn diagram of  Fleming’s Left Hand Rule which I found in seconds on Wikipedia) and sharing that knowledge with others is incredibly useful.

What was true in 1994 – when I first wrote a successful grant proposal for social media in education – is true now. Sharing and borrowing is what we need to facilitate. Sharing and borrowing are social actions. They involve reciprocity and interaction between the people who share and borrow. It comes with knowledge that the people are the source and people are the receivers of this stuff and that is quite a different mindset to the notion of a repository. They are verbs associated with communities. They come with conversations.

It is increasingly easy to find stuff and publish stuff in ways they can be found. The repository is the internet and search engines are pretty dam powerful. They both become much more powerful when people are trading ideas around what is there.

My first attempt at a “virtual learning platform” was an open access room in my University that was open ‘til late. It had 12 networked MacPlus with some networked hard drives (G. Sidhu is the unsung hero of modern computing for developing AppleTalk) with the best peripherals and software tools I could afford (Scanners etc). People met, people talked, people traded, people created together. My second attempt added FirstClass to this – which coupled with putting 56 computers into the schools where my pre-service trainee teachers were learning to teach. I learned from this.

One thing I learned is that teaching and sharing on line is not straight-forward. People who were starting using the internet for learning just then where doing things like putting up some text and the telling students to “discuss and respond” in some associated forum. The kid who was going to do well usually wrote a convincing response and the best the rest could do would be to say “me-too” or “flame”. Instruction to students needed to be structured in ways that allowed multiple responses and required students to think about how they would involve others in their learning. It needed to be like the open access room where there was borrowing, sharing and mutual support. I have some  historic advice on this.

The online environment we started to build as a European Framework 4 Telematics project REM was about a multi-media learning network (we were not building platforms or repositories- we were building tools for a learning network – a different mind-set). It had means to share and discuss resources and to build collaborative learning in a virtual resource rich environment. As with all too many projects the files now rest on an old hard disk with files dated December 2000 – the end of funding.

There was a tension in the development I am only just fully coming to understand. There was some feeling amongst the project workers that there was “a” workflow through which we would drive people. We adopted a model from a paper by Lehrer et  et al . This was constructivist in its intent – however I do not think that the authors intended it to be as hard wired as a workflow as our designs might have made it.  I think design and learning are not one-way flows or on a single track. Human activity is capable of managing multiple tracks – and prefers it that way – that is to say learning is managed by the learner – learning management is not imposed or assumed by the system. As an aside, my colleagues who promoted this system initially (with my full agreement) went on to be leading proponents of IMS Learning Design. I think at a micro level it is clearly the job of a tutor to direct attention to what is salient and more importantly provide formative feedback to students on their learning. I am far from convinced that there is a set of recipes, templates or algorithms that are the formula for teaching and learning success. I appreciate that has been a holy grail for learning technology. My 36 year career in learning technology has been littered with such visions from   Skinner  onwards. I think humans are much too good at learning to be constrained by such tracks.  I even proposed an   educational modeling language  based on conversations and meaning making (as per  Nonaka) myself.

I   do think that some of the ideas expressed about the teaching of creativity in design by  Richard Kimbell at London Goldsmiths – who proposes phases like having ideas, developing ides and testing ideas without suggesting that students might not be doing all three in some sense at any time – although design will tend to go in a general direction if it is to be completed.

But getting back to the main thread of thought. In our second phase of development of this learning network tools we engaged with a BIG international bank. What was learned from talking to their training management was that they had  profound understanding of learning in their company, that development of staff was multi-dimensional: company process knowledge; knowledge of the industry’s facts and concepts (legal frameworks, economics etc) ; generic knowledge (IT skills) and interpersonal skills and so on. Using a standardised controlled vocabulary to describe their resources or most of the wrappings of systems like SCORM did not begin to address the richness of training they needed to deliver. However they were very systematic in profiling employees, their employees career trajectories, and equally profiling the needs and skills that the company required to function as a business. They recognized they needed systems of mentoring, instruction, community building, reward-giving, need-identification, ambition fulfilling . They had their own dynamic mappings of conversations, resources and learning pathways. The pathways were never straight.

Here is a simple case example. An employee was newly charged with writing a quarterly report that demanded skills in spreadsheets and charts he had not previously had. Normal processes would have had them identify and external course provider and sent the employee out for a day at some high-cost and loss of his labour for that day. A modern trend might have been the provision of one of the many dull online courses there are in the subject. However the company had tagged or profiled one of its employees with “Excel expert” and “mentoring” attributes. The company demonstrated that having someone show you the ropes to get going and being there to help when you get stuck is quite and efficient way of learning to use software – and in the process two people were having their career developed and a community of practice was being augmented.

When Graham Attwell writes about social media tools connected together to make learning are   better than VLEs  we should think about that social process of learning and teaching. Sure we can probably do them better with loosely coupled tools but I can still make cock-ups. The way we plumb things together is significant and needs to map onto the activity system or be part of the transformation of an activity system. That is a new skill – however we are fortunate in that the tool-bag is fairly bulging with opportunity and we can add, remove, augment or find scope for new invention. We can build many tailored systems for sharing and reciprocity that are true to the context in which they work. One size, one platform, one standard does not fit all.

I have chosen “I-Europe” as the title of my personal blog. Obviously, there is a story behind this title. In this case the story is related to discussions at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) 2003 in Hamburg. Looking back, these discussions were a turning point in the development of European vocational education training (VET) research communities. Moreover, for me personally the discussions in Hamburg (and the follow-up phase) were a learning experience in my own re-positioning as a European VET researcher. So, I need to revisit the Hamburg experience in order to explain what this blog of mine stands for in the current discussion on European VET research and in the mapping of European innovations in VET.

Back to ECER 2003 in Hamburg

Alongside the ECER 2003 in Hamburg the VETNET network of European VET researchers (see www.vet-research.net) organised an Open Meeting to discuss alternative prospects for European research cooperation. The reasons for organising this special meeting were the following factors:

1. The preparation of proposals for the 6th European framework programme had become a Marathon run for creating huge consortia to cover ‘critical mass’ of European VET research by strong partners. Yet, at the end of this Marathon there semmed to be very few survivors and there was much doubt whether such consortia were workable.
2. As an alternative option for trans-national cooperation in European educational research the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) of the UK had started to create a network with other national research programmes in education and training. The related “Learning in Knowledge Society” (LinKS) platform appeared to offer a new avenue for European cooperation (independently of Brussels).
3. In addition to the two above mentioned developments there was a need to discuss the state of the art in VET research after the completion of earlier generations of European projects and networked research activities. Also, there was an open question, how the umbrella networkVETNET could support new initiatives.

The “I-Europe” approach as an alternative agenda

My contribution to the Open Meeting was related to the third point. I prepared a Power Point presentation (which I still have to dig out from the archives of lost treasures) and subsequently a strategy paper (see the attached document) – both with the heading “I-Europe”. My idea was to stimulate VET researchers’ own debate on a future European research agenda. The “I-Europe” approach drew attention to following developments in VET and to related research tasks:

a) Integrative developments: The need to analyse the role of European framework processes and the prospects for promoting mutual learning across different VET systems or VET cultures;

b) Innovative developments: The need to analyse the role of pedagogic innovations in VET or work-related learning and their relevance for wider innovation agendas in working life and reagional contexts.

c) Intercultural developments: The need to analyse internationalisation of labour markets, redistribution of job opportunities and new mobility across Europe as a challenge for hitherto national-oriented VET policies and practices.

d) Inclusive developments: The need to analyse the possibilities for promoting social inclusion and alternative career prospects with the help of vocational learning and the use of portfolios in the empowerment of learners.

As I remember it, the “I-Europe” presentation was received well in the meeting and there was a great sense of having something common to be shared with the colleagues. I was encouraged to write it down as a strategy paper and to circulate it across Europe. Some colleagues felt that we should sign it as a “Manifesto”. But the everday life brought very soon the grey realities into picture.

The short history  of the follow-up

When I actually managed to write my thoughts into a strategy paper and to present thed paper for the VETNET board meeting some months later, there was very little do be done with it. The colleagues gave praise for bringing together several strategic points and suggesting corresponding activities (reviewing, accompanying and evaluating activities). Yet, without special funding to carry out such measures, there was no prospect to continue the discussion on the basis of the “I-Europe” strategy paper. Everyone was busily looking for new funding opportunities and there was very little available for such self-developed initiatives to promote European research & development dialogue in the field of VET.

As I remember the discussion at the VETNET board meeting, one of the collegues – possibly Alan Brown – mentioned that the paper was years ahead its time. At the moment this seamed to me as a ‘fair enough’ interim assessment and to move on to other issues. Now, after some years have passed, it is possible to look back and consider, what all has changed and what would now be appropriate ways to stimulate new research intiatives, networking and knowledge sharing in European VET research. Furthermore, now it is possible to take a look what are the new developments in the European landscape of VET-related innovations.

So, this is the background story for my personal blog. In my next posting I will revisit the “I-Europe” approach from the perspective of present date and bring the debate ‘back to future’.

Pekka Kämäräinen

PS. For those who have an interest to go deeper into the discussions at ECER 2003 in Hamburg I have also attached my related mission reports of the year 2003 and my presentation at our ECER symposium.

Pontydysgy will from now on host my personal blog. I thank Graham and Dirk for this opportunity and try to do my best.

I will write on current developments in vocational education and training (VET) with a focus on

• Innovations in teaching/learning processes and in the use of digital media,
• Integrative initiatives in European cooperation and in trans-continental dialogue,
• Inclusive initiatives in the shaping of educational pathways and vocational progression routes,
• Intercultural understanding at the level of international cooperation projects and everday life in education and training.

All this is related to my work as a researcher in VET (with a focus on European and international cooperation). In a short while I will tell more of the background of the name “I-Europe” and explain what it stands for.
Welcome to share this space with me,

Pekka Kämäräinen

(Pekka Kämäräinen is a senior researcher at Institut Technik & Bildung (ITB), University of Bremen and a voluntary test-writer at the blog-space of Pontydysgu.)

Bit quiet on this blog at the moment. That is because I am in wall to wall meetings. And, even worse, endless travel to meetings.

Its preety exhausting. It is not the time youy are in the meetings but the endless activity. True, the best bit of any meeting is in the pub in the evening. That is where the ideas get flowing. But it means you don’t stop from half past seven in the morning until eleven at night. And I’ve been doing it for ten days now with another 14 days to go.

So I got wondering if all these meetings are necessary. Surely there must be some ways in which we can use technology to help. Yes, Skype is being used for audio and there is a slow trend towards more use of video conferencing. But this tends to be in addition to the meetings.

The problem – I think – is the lack of thinking about the purpose of meetings and the forms in which collaboration take.  What are we trying to achieve? How do we need to work to achieve this? How can that best be done. Even with the increasing use of wikis and wiki type environments we have not really worked out how to develop collaborative writing. So called workshop sessions are all too often presentations with questions.

Much of this could be done with technology – given a little imagination and planning. II think one problem is that many of the meetinsg I attend are bing frun by researchers. Researchers are not trained in how to plan and moderate workshops. the best meetings are often those planned by trainers. They are experienced in how to moderate collaboration. They worry about what the aims and objectives of the meeting are.

One last thing, before I finish this moan (and I am well aware of how many people are envious of all this travel). The endless air travel involved in international project is not sustainable. I hate to think of what my carbon footprint would look like. And perosnally I think there is much to be said for on-line conferences. They are not the same – but they bring a different quality to conference type events. As the AKA Specials once said: “Different, but Equal”.

So OK, just for the record – next week I am in Pontypridd in wales, the first part of the next week I am in Houston, Texas, and the second half am in Bucharest, Romania. If you’re around and fancy a pint just drop me an email.

Bit quiet on this blog at the moment. That is because I am in wall to wall meetings. And, even worse, endless travel to meetings.

Its preety exhausting. It is not the time youy are in the meetings but the endless activity. True, the best bit of any meeting is in the pub in the evening. That is where the ideas get flowing. But it means you don’t stop from half past seven in the morning until eleven at night. And I’ve been doing it for ten days now with another 14 days to go.

So I got wondering if all these meetings are necessary. Surely there must be some ways in which we can use technology to help. Yes, Skype is being used for audio and there is a slow trend towards more use of video conferencing. But this tends to be in addition to the meetings.

The problem – I think – is the lack of thinking about the purpose of meetings and the forms in which collaboration take. What are we trying to achieve? How do we need to work to achieve this? How can that best be done. Even with the increasing use of wikis and wiki type environments we have not really worked out how to develop collaborative writing. So called workshop sessions are all too often presentations with questions.

Much of this could be done with technology – given a little imagination and planning. II think one problem is that many of the meetinsg I attend are bing frun by researchers. Researchers are not trained in how to plan and moderate workshops. the best meetings are often those planned by trainers. They are experienced in how to moderate collaboration. They worry about what the aims and objectives of the meeting are.

One last thing, before I finish this moan (and I am well aware of how many people are envious of all this travel). The endless air travel involved in international project is not sustainable. I hate to think of what my carbon footprint would look like. And perosnally I think there is much to be said for on-line conferences. They are not the same – but they bring a different quality to conference type events. As the AKA Specials once said: “Different, but Equal”.

So OK, just for the record – next week I am in Pontypridd in wales, the first part of the next week I am in Houston, Texas, and the second half am in Bucharest, Romania. If you’re around and fancy a pint just drop me an email.