I was greatly inspired by the Wise Kids conference on Young People in a Digital World – Preparing, Inspiring and Supporting, held in Bangor in Wales on Wednesday. This was the second of two regional conferences, with videos from the first, in Swansea earlier in the week are available now online (the video by Tanya Byron, who advices the UK government on internet safety is encouraging from a policy point of view).

Here are a few impressionistic comments which by no means express the breadth and quality of the event.

Two things which particularly encouraged me. The first was the breadth of organisations represented by participants. This included teachers, local government officers, youth workers, researchers and delegates from internet and software companies and the  voluntary sector. The second was the active involvement of young people themselves in the conference.

And for me, the highlight was the youth panel of some ten or so students from Ysgol Trfyan. They were thoughtful, articulate and above all opinionated. Having previously presented a Welsh language drama about e-safety, they went on to answer questions from participants in the conference. all but one said that if they were forced to choose they would give up television rather than the internet. But there main message was their opposition to the ban on accessing social networking sites and particular Facebook from school. They said the reason they had been told for the ban was that social networks had been used for cheating in exams (unlikely as I found this, a report in last weeks Guardian claims the use of mobile phones for cheating is on the increase!). However they could not see why Facebook has been banned when there was still access to other sites including games. “Facebook is better for learning than games”, said one. Another said: “Whatever they ban we will find a way around it:. And although there may have been an element of campaigning going on, when asked what site they accessed first when they went on the internet, nine said Facebook, one YouTube, and one shopping.

Members of the panel has obviously researched the question of e-safety in some depth in preparation for their drama performance. However, whilst they felt schools should do more to teach internet safety and that also parents should pay more attention to what their children were doing on the internet, they were against nanny programmes. They were also dubious that present age restrictions of access to sites like Facebook were working. One member of the panel said that if her younger sister insisted she was going to set up a Facebook account,, despite being under 13, at the end of the day it was pointless to try to stop her but instead she would try to watch out for her sister’s safety!

The issue of safety tended to overwhelm the conference. As chair Alan Davies said, we seemed to be doing a lot of preparing, and supporting, but not so much inspiring.

Especially in the workshop sessions there was a lot of inspiring. I enjoyed the presentation by Rebecca Newton on Moshi Monsters. But my favourites were the workshop sessions by John Davitt – Occupy the Hand and Mind – simple strategies to make learners active with New Tools – and Leon Cynch‘s brave exploration of the suddenly unfashionable Second Life.

However these sessions were very much geared towards teachers and trainers. There is a big gap – a gap between what such pioneers as John and Leon are doing and the reality of what our systems administrators and school managers are allowing. And it is that gap which was so eloquently exposed by the students from Ysgol Trfyan. The issue of firewalls, white lists and so on is not an administrative issue. If education is to keep in touch with the way young people (and older people too) are exploring and using the internet for learning, for work and for play, then we have to rethink the present absurd policy of banning social software.

Yes, online safety is an issue. But Wise Kids has shown that internet safety is computable with open systems and that educating young people is a better policy than policing them.

A quick blogsquat from Jenny Hughes….

I have been fascinated by the Yellow Arrow project and my mind is working overtime thinking of of ways it could be extended from art to education.

For those of you who have not come across it yet, the Yellow Arrow project is a global public art project that started in New York and is now an underground movement that has spread to over 450 cities in 35 countries.

Basically, you download a yellow arrow sticker from the project website and stick it somewhere public. If someone sees the sticker, they can text the code number on it to a particular telephone number and will immediately receive a text back with a message left by the person who put the sticker there.

So the yellow arrow basically means ‘there’s more here: a hidden detail, a funny story, a memory or a crazy experience.’ Each arrow links digital content to a specific location using the mobile phone.

If you want more info, just go to http://yellowarrow.net/v3/

The yellow arrow messages range from personal reflection to concrete information about, for example, the history of the building the arrow is stuck on. They sort of cross the divide between tourism and art.

Now I got interested in the idea during the Taccle training courses and tried out a variation on this using a commercial application, which was actually nothing to do with the Yellow Arrow project. (For details of this see, my previous post http://www.pontydysgu.org/2009/11/25-practical-ideas-for-using-mobile-phones-in-the-classroom/ ) I stumbled on the Yellow Arrow idea when I was browsing around for ideas on getting teachers to explore mobile technologies.

It seems to me that there are endless possibilities for developing ‘Yellow Arrow Learning. – The text messages could have an explicit learning content.

• The arrows could be coded by subject area or topic.
• Using a Google maps mash up you could design learning trails.
• The telephone number to ring could be linked to our own server. So, for example, we could add urls to You Tube or Flickr
• You could get whole communities involved – why not a local town (like Pontypridd) becoming a Yellow Arrow Learning Community?
• Get all the schools involved as well as local industry. So a yellow arrow stuck on the brickworks could lead to a video of bricks being made.
• Why not extend the public domain yellow arrows to the inside / private domain as well – yellow arrow work based learning?

The possibilities seem endless. The technology is simple. It might, in the future be upgraded to augmented reality applications or use QR instead of phone numbers – or both.

Graham and I are both interested in doing some work to progress some of these ideas and possibly putting in a funding application or working with someone else who wants to. It could be quite an edgy project if we can get a really creative team together. If any of you are interested and have some ideas, please get in touch.

More thoughts on competence – mostly in my attempts to develop an idea of how mobile devices could be used for learning in the workplace – and in particular for practice based and informal learning.

In my last post on this subject I pointed to definitions of competence from German research seeing the main aim of the development of competence is the ‘formation of personality structures with a view to coping with the requirements of change within the process of transformation and the further evolution of economic and social life.’

This definition is counter-posed to the more narrow and functionalist views of competence more common in the UK and USA research and education and training systems.

In this post I want to revisit earlier research work in Germany by Gerald Heidegger and Felix Rauner who looked at occupational profiles. Occupational profiles are in effect groups of competencies based on individual occupations. In Germany there are over 360 officially recognised occupations.

Heidegger and Rauner  were commissioned by the Government of Rhineland Westphalia to write a Gutachten (policy advice) on the future reform and modernisation of the German Dual System for apprenticeship training.

They recommended less and broader occupational profiles and, if my memory is right, the idea of wandering occupational profiles. By this term they were looking to map the boundaries between different occupations and to recognise where competences from one occupation overlapped with that of another. Such overlaps could form the basis for boundary crossing and for moving from one occupation to another.

Heidegger and Rauner’s work was grounded in an understanding of the interplay between education, work organisation and technology. They were particularly focused on the idea of work process knowledge –  applied and practice based knowledge in the workplace. This was once more predicated on an idea of competence in which the worker would make conscious choices of the best actions to undertake in any particular situation (rather than the approach to competences in the UK which assumes there is always a ‘right way’ to do something).

Per Erik Ellstroem from Sweden has put forward the idea of Developmental Competence – the capacity of the individual to acquire and demonstrate the capacity to act on a task  and the wider work environment in order to adapt, act and shape (design) it.

This is based on the pedagogic idea of sense making and meaning making through exploring, questioning and transcending traditional work structures and procedures. In a similar vein, Rauner has come up with the idea of holistic work tasks, based on the idea that a worker should understand the totality of the work process they are involved in. He has proposed collaboration between small companies to ensure broad based training for apprentices.

One of the major problems within the German apprenticeship training system (which accounts for over half of the age cohort leaving school each year) is lack of co-ordination between the school and company based parts of the training. However, a mobile based Personal Learning Environment could allow apprentices to control their own learning and sense making through linking up practical tasks in the workplace to the more theory based school learning.  Informal and work based learning could potentially be mapped against competences with such a system.

(References to follow)

A quick post about mobile devices and work based learning – which I know I have been going on about a lot lately.

So far most of the work on mobile learning at a practical level seems to me to fit into four categories:

• applications designed to provide information for students – about their courses, lecture times, venues, transport information, buildings etc.
• what might be called learning objects – small apps designed to support learning about a particular topic or issue – often using multi media
• apps or projects aiming to improve communication between learners or between learners and teachers
• information – revision guides etc. designing to promote mobile access to resources

There is nothing wrong about any of these and they all may be useful in pushing mobile learning forward. But I think they may fail to really extend forward ideas about tecahing and learning 0 they are all essentially repackaging existing elearning applications for mobile devices.

The big potential I see for mobile devices is in their affordances of being always on – or almost always on, in the fact that we already accept the idea of the frequent but sporadic use of the devices for all kinds of activities such as taking photos and messaging – as well as making telephone calls – and that they are portable.

in other words – taking learning support to areas it has not been taken to before. And prime amongst these is teh workplace. It is little coincidence that many of the main take-up areas for elearning are for those occupations which involve regular use of computers e.g in ICT occupations, in marketing and management etc. Ans one of the main issues in developing elearning for vocational or occupational learning is the contextual nature of such learning and the high cost of producing specific learnng materials for relatively low numbers of learners. Vocational students often wish for learning materials to be in their own language, thus exacerbating the problem of small numbers of users for specific occupations.

It is also interesting to note that despite many researchers pointing to the importance of reflection as a key pedagogic tool, there has been limited pedagogic and technical development to facilitate such an approach.

The use of mobile devices can overcome this. They can be used in specific contexts of location, tasks, experince, colleagues and allow ready means of reflection through the use of photographs, video, text and audio.

If linked up to a server based ‘portfolio’ this could form an essential part of a Personal Learning Environment. Furthermore the learning materials become the entire work environment, rather than custom built applications. And tools such as Google Goggles could easily be incorporated (although I have to say it seems more alphe than beta ot me – I havent managed to get it to recognise a single object so far!).

I am mush taken with a free Android Ap called Ontheroad. It doesn’t do much. It is designed its ays for you to share your adventures on the road You have to set up a free account on a web site. You can publish active trips (I am going to try to make one this week). You can add articles including your position by GPS, you can add text, multimedia, dates and choose which trip to publish it to though the telephone network or by SMS. You can browse existing articles and look at comments. You can add media including photos already on your gallery. Or you can record a video (audio support seems limited).

And it is all synced through a server. It would not take much to refocus this app to a Learning Journey, rather than a road trip. And it could be incredibly powerful in terms of work based learning.

So I do not see a great technical challenge. the bigger challenge is in developing a pedagogic approach which incorporates informal learning in the workplace and such a portfolio based on practice within formal approaches ot education and training.

If you are interested in working with me to develop these technologies and ideas please get in touch.

I am surprised that there has not been more discussion of the UK Open University’s decison to sign up to Google Education for cloud computing services.

On his blog Niall Sclater says:

“In our first foray into cloud computing, Google will be hosting for our students:

• email (gmail)
• contacts
• instant messaging and presence
• calendar
• document creation, storage and sharing
• websites”

Interestingly, The OU, the UK’s largest univeristy, will not at the moment be giving staff access ot the system, presumably becuase of concerns over security and confidentiality.

Niall explains the reasons for the decision :

“Growing numbers of institutions are now adopting cloud-based systems such as Google Apps for Education, particularly in the US. The arguments for hosting your own student email are becoming increasingly weak when it can be done externally for free, or at least much more cheaply. Google will provide a service level agreement with higher levels of availability than we could achieve ourselves. In addition there are other services included such as instant messaging that we don’t currently provide to students but could help them to connect more with each other.”

However the decision has interesting implications for pedgogic approaches. Niall says:

“These systems will increasingly start to compete with some of the features of learning management systems / virtual learning environments such as Moodle and Blackboard. They provide a higher level of individual control for students and potentially remove some of the administrative burden from the university. …

Another area for investigation is the use of Google Apps as an eportfolio system. Our initial research has shown that it would work for some of the key aspects of eportfolio provision such as the storage of documents under the control of the user, the exporting of these so they can be taken with them through life, and the creation of templates for the collection of structured data for a variety of purposes. We still need to work out how we can freeze or export eportfolio content where it is being for formal assessment.”

In a comment on the blog, Tim Hunt, also from the Open University, says:

“The VLE is the University’s space where it publishes its courses, and students come to study that material and perform some course-specific activities.

Google tools / ePortfolio / PLE / student’s own laptop are the student’s spaces for keeping and managing their learning.

In a traditional bricks a and mortar, chalk and talk setting, the VLE is the lecture room and labs; and Google tools are the student’s room in the hall of residence, or possibly their leaver-arch file.

I think it is clear that you need both types of space, and that they complement each other. However, there are some activities that could take place in either space.”

Manish Malik from Portsmouth University, which is already giving access to Google cloud services to all students, tries to distinguish between PLEs, VLEs, loosely coupled applications and what he calls a “CLE or Cloud Learning Environment”

” The cloud can be seen as one big autonomous system not owned by any educational institution. Let the Academics or Learners be the users, of some cloud based services, who all equally share the privelages like control, choice, sharing of content etc on these services. Then this is different from a PLE, a VLE and a PTE. For example Google Apps for universities is hosted on the cloud, not fully controlled by any educational institution and certainly not owned by one. The tools on it are to a great extent academic or learner controlled. Each “Google Site”, for example, can be owned by an academic or a Learner and both users be given the same rights/control by one another (depending on who creates first). Likewise Google Docs can be owned and shared between learners themselves or learners and academics under their own control.

This gives all parties the same rights on same set of tools. This clearly has potential to enable and facilitate both formal and informal learning for the learner. Both the academic and the learner are free to use the tools the way they wanted and share and collaborate with anyone they wanted.”

I think Malik is wrong is distinguishing between PLEs and CLEs (and to be honest, we really need just to advance our understandings of PLEs, rather than invent yet more acrobyms and terminology). If we go back to the blog entry which strated it all – Scott Wilson’s “The Future VLE?”, it was always clear that a PLE would include different third party services  (even though cloud computing was not a term invented then as far as I know).

However, there are a number of interesting issues raised by the move towards cloud services for students.

Firstly, the services provided by Google make it very easy for s student to develop their own PLE. One of the long running concerns about PLEs has been whether or not all students have the knowledge and skills with technology to develop their PLE. This may overcome such concerns. Furthermore, in a podcast interview with Niall I made three years ago, he expressed the concern that university computer services had a duty to provide support for all applications a university was using for tecahing and learning. If PLEs were to be introduced he argued, this would be impossible due to the very diversity of different platforms and applications. Presumably, the deal with Google overcomes that issue.

Of course it is all to easy to see Google as the new evil empire, taking over education. But unless the nature of the deal between universities totally ties down systems, it should be relatively easy to integrate third party services with the Google apps, at least for someone with reasonable digital skills. And although Niall Sclater refers to ePortoflios, I see little difference in the way this is developing to a PLE.

Of course, there are worries about trusting a PLE to third party commercial companies. But data is not locked down on Google in the way it is on platforms like Facebook. it should be relatively simple for a learner to keep copies of important work and data on their own computers (and indeed to update those copies when they change computers).

Interesting, from my present interests, it  should be relatively simple to integrate Google apps with the Android platform, this making mobile learning much cimpler (ignoring of course the problems with cross paltform use).

Of course the proof will be in the use. Will teachers start moving to Google apps rather than use the Open Univeristiy’s Moodle platform? Will learners develop their own PLEs? How will the Google apps integrate with univeristy services and applications. Will data be secure and will Google continue to support student PLEs even after they have left university: Is this just a new form of lockin? And how reliable are Google services? Do the moves by Portsmouth and the Open University herald a large scale shift by educational institutions to cloud services?

Most of all – will the use of these services provide new pedagogic affordances which will lead to changing practices in teaching and learning? Tims will tell.

I was idly wasting time reading my twitter stream and it occurred to me that I seem to be getting less tweets these days. So I twittered out “Is it my impression or do i get less tweets these days. Following more people so are they just tweeting less?: And in the wonderful way that twitter works back came a reply from @paulbrichardson: “I am getting fewer tweets too. But there is more substance to them – usually expressing or referencing an idea..” This was quickly followed up by “Worried that my last tweet points to an attempt at a taxonomy of tweets. I am definitely not going there though…” And of course @tmartinowen couldn’t resist the bait: “here is a totally unsubstantial tweet – just to keep the classification going – or does the parenthesis give it substance?”

Nor would I wish to risk a classification. But there do seem to be a few things going on in the way we are using twitter (or at least the people I follow). There are far less of the straight forward “good morning Twitterverse” or “had a great lunch” or “tired and going to bed now” type tweets. u suspect this was a leftover from the Facebook status update days (in the same way few people are bothering to update their skype status nowadays). Have we simply become bored with our own mundane lives?

And Paul is right – most of the tweets I receive do seem to be on points of substance and many point to a resource. This may be due to the increasing use of sophisticated Twitter clients and to cross application linking through the API (e.g posting Diego links to twitter). Twitter is becoming a rich repository of links to resources. However discovery remains problematic and harvesting is tricky due to lack of longevity.

This is all to the good. But I am increasingly missing the social nature of Twitter which also seems to be on the wane. We are using twitter for reporting and shouting out but does it still retain the social and collaborative nature of its early days? Of course there remain the odd maverick – @johnpopham’s #uktrains series is strangely compulsive.

A further trend is to increase the ability of machines to read twitter through hash tag taxonomies. As reported in the ReadWriteWeb a group of hackers ” in collaboration with Project EPIC, developed a new syntax to make it easier for computers to read tweets from areas that are affected by a disaster. If adopted widely, this new hashtag-based syntax will make it easier to automatically extract data about locations or the status of a road or person.”

But as comments on the blog pointed out such taxonomies are far from people friendly. is there a trade off between machine readable functionality and human and social uses of media?

Twitter is an interesting platform because of the wide affordances in its social use. The changing ways in which we are using Twitter may point to the evolution of the use of wider social media in the future.

Anyway – time to send a tweet announcing this post 🙂

In December I wrote about a workshop I had attended at the Alpine-Rendezvous event organised by the European Stellar Network. The workshop: on ‘Technology-enhanced learning in the context of technological, societal and cultural transformation’ was organised by Norbert Pachler, the convenor of the London Mobile Learning Group (LMLG), housed at the Centre for Excellence in Work-based Learning for Educational Professionals at the Institute of Education, London.

The LMLG comprises an international, interdisciplinary group of researchers from the fields of educational, media and cultural studies, social semiotics and educational technology. The aim of the workshop was to augment the work of the LMLG, in particular around its socio-cultural ecology, and to extend the interdisciplinary nature of its work through exposure to perspectives advanced by (TEL) researchers in cognate fields from across Europe and the US, in particular in relation to design-based approaches.

This blog is an edited verion of Norbert’s report on the workshop. The full report will be published as part of proceedings of the workshop will be published as a Special Issue of the International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning in 2010 guest edited by Norbert Pachler.

For me, one of the most interesting points about the recent debate around Open education is the exploration of the links between theory and practice. I have been long frustrated by the paucity of theory in the area of Technology Enhanced Education. and it is apparent that if we are to develop a convincing body of theory which can properly inform and reflect practice, it is necessary to engage in a multi-disciplinary discourse with researchers and practitioners coming from different fields of study and action.

The workshop in Garmisch comprised of an attempt at developing such a discourse and whilst the findings may represent only our early efforts to understand each other, I valued the opportunity to take part in such a discussion.

Norbert says:

“The LMLG sees learning using mobile devices governed by a triangular relationship between socio-cultural structures, cultural practices and the agency of media users / learners, represented in the three domains. The interrelationship of these three components: agency, the user’s capacity to act on the world, cultural practices, the routines users engage in their everyday lives, and the socio-cultural and technological structures that govern their being in the world, we see as an ecology, which in turn manifests itself in the form of an emerging cultural transformation. Another significant trend, which requires pedagogical responses, is the prevalence of what we call ‘user-generated contexts’. We are currently witnessing a significant shift away from traditional forms of mass communication and editorial push towards user-generated content and individualised communication contexts. These structural changes to mass communication also affect the agency of the user and their relationship with traditional and new media. Indeed, the LMLG argues that users are now actively engaged in shaping their own forms of individualised generation of contexts for learning through individualised communication contexts. New relationships between context and production are emerging in that mobile devices not only enable the production of content but also of contexts. They position the user in new relationships with space, i.e. the outer world, and place, i.e. social space. Mobile devices enable and foster the broadening and breaking up of genres. Citizens become content producers who are part of an explosion of activity in the area of user-generated content. What are the implications for education?

The workshop inter alia sought to explore the following questions and issues:

• Learning as a process of meaning-making for the LMLG occurs through acts of communication, which take place within rapidly changing socio-cultural, mass communication and technological structures. Does the notion of learner-generated cultural resources represent a sustainable paradigm shift for formal education in which learning is viewed in categories of context and not content? What are the issues in terms of ‘text’ production in terms of modes of representation, (re)contextualisation and conceptions of literacy? Who decides/redefines what it means to have coherence in contemporary interaction?
• What synergies are there between the socio-cultural ecological approach to mobile learning, which the LMLG developed (see Pachler, Bachmair and Cook, 2010), with paradigms put forward by different (TEL) research communities in Europe and beyond?
• What relationship is there between user-generated content, user-generated contexts and learning? How can educational institutions cope with the more informal communicative approaches to digital interactions that new generations of learners possess?
• What pedagogical parameters are there in response to the significant transformation of society, culture and education currently taking place alongside technological innovation?

Position papers and questions for discussion were made available in advance of the workshop on Google Groups as well as Cloudworks. During the workshop contributors’ presentations were added and participants in Garmisch and beyond contributed to the discussion on Cloudworks as well as on Twitter.

Key messages from the workshop:

The mixture of theory and practice was felt to have worked well and to have been fruitful particularly in view of a potential chasm developing between the research community and the policy and practitioner communities in the field of mobile learning.

The workshop underlined the importance of definitional clarity around key terminology, particular in the context of interdisciplinary work in an international context.

Mobile learning, the main focus of the workshop, can be seen to deal with complex issues, which benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. Despite interdisciplinarity adding complexity and this complexity needing to be managed sensitively, there exists a need for greater richness in the conceptual foundations of mobile learning; there is arguably a need to challenge the hegemony of education, psychology and computer science as the foundational disciplines of the mobile learning research community.

Some topics, such as sustainability, have proved to be multi-layered and the concurrent discussion of different layers during the workshopprovided fruitful insights into possible different framings of each given topic and issue.

The workshop showed that the key theoretical framework used at the event for illuminating the use of mobile learning – the LMLG’s socio-cultural approach – has provided a useful lens and a shared vocabulary for analysis. At the same time it transpired that, in relation to some topics such as work-based learning, more work is required to align it and its theoretical underpinnings with established discourses in certain areas, such as WBL. Work-based mobile learning has to be embedded in the work-processes and current practices and not be designed as an extra layer. Structure in WBML is not only related to media platforms but also to organisational structures and focusing only on the first issue would be too narrow. Power-relationships are a central construct to be considered in WBML. And, the fact that businesses are orientated towards a productivity paradigm, rather than towards a learning paradigm, poses a particular challenge for WBML. A key question appears to be to what extent practices around mobile devices influence work-life balance.

The discussion around user-generated contexts demonstrated the complexity of the notion of context and how its different understandings are rooted in divers epistemological and ontological traditions.

The discussions around augmented reality brought to the fore a number of issues in particular around retention, perception and coherence as well as filtering and the need for criticality on the part of the user.

With respect to augmented contexts for development, the question arose whether Vygotskyan notions of perception / attention / temporality are a way forward and how these notions link in concrete terms to more academic / traditional views of ‘literacy’. And, what are the implications of for the emerging field of mobile augmented reality? Is it possible to replace the more capable peer in the zone of proximal development?

Synergies with design-based research were generally seen to offer considerable potential for the work of the LMLG and beyond. In particular, there emerged a strong sense of potential around the bringing together of a hermeneutic and critical historical approach to planning and analysis of teaching and learning, i.e. critical didactic, with the experimental, empirical evaluative approach offered by design research.

In terms of sustainability, the workshop concluded that much more still needs to be done in terms of understanding the complexity of the notion of sustainability. The discussion showed that there exists an important, and currently under-explored, ethical context to mobile learning, that is the context in which we connect with learners, composed in part of challenges such as sustainability, scalability (or transferability or replication), equity, inclusion, opportunity, embedding. It relates to a concern for the role of mobile learning for addressing forms of deprivation and disadvantage and informing the relevant policy environment.

Overall it can be noted that the discussions during the two days reiterated the need for a paradigm change in education to enable young people to deal with the implications of ongoing transformations.”

References:

Pachler, N., Bachmair, B. and Cook, J. (2010) Mobile learning: structures, agency, practices. New York: Springer

Is Google running short of imagination. Not when it comes to applications – there seems to be a new product announcement almost everyday. But Google Goggles – who thought that up? Its a terrible name. But in terms of developing a work based mobile learning platform it may represent a big step forward.

Goggles is a very simple application. You merely point your Android phone at an object – a building, an object, an artefact – and it produces search results based on the image (Google say they will be porting it to other platforms in the future).

If course Goggles has not been developed for learning. Google are interested in driving more search traffic to their site and have arguably paid little attention to education in the past (witness the little attention paid to developing Google scholar). But we have noted before the way in which social software applications (as well as mobile devices) are being appropriated for learning despite their original design purpose.

Work based learning poses particular opportunities and issues and for mobile learning.  Most elearning courses are based on formal programmes of study, on a curriculum, usually designed around a particular discipline. Even vocational programmes envisage steady progression through a corpus of ideas and knowledge, albeit with practice based phases. Work based learning is predicated on occupational practice. Practice is often inter disciplinary in terms of a knowledge base and progression is dependent on the nature of the work being carried out. In other words in work based learning the context of action is king. Up to now it has proved difficult to develop elearning base don widely differing contexts of practice based action.

Mobile devices have portability to be used in workplaces where access to computers may be problematic. Goggles can allow simple gesturing to allow access to a wealth of information about the particular practice being carried out. Of course this is not enough to support learning. Learning requires reflection. But it is not difficult to envisage a simple interface allowing reflection through audio, video or text input which could then be aggregated along with the original video which sparked the reflection and the results of the Google search. The addition of keywords could allow such reflections to be added to a Personal or Organisational Learning Environment. Geotagging could also allow an extension to enhanced reality applications thus allowing interaction with other learners also encountered similar learning situations.

The object or artefact opens a Zone of Proximal Development in Vygotsky’s terminology, with ‘the significant other’ supporting learning being mediated through technology.

Workplaces could become a rich learning environment with learning opportunities embedded in artefacts and in geographical spaces. And at the sameGoogle Giggles  time informal learning, that learning which takes place everyday in relation to context, can be brought together within a formal learning base.

None of this seems unrealistic to me. Who wants to build me some apps to try it?

I am very fond of saying that we must look at pedagogy first. Technology is just a tool. But of course it is an important tool. And despite all the interest in mobile learning, thus far practice has been limited. One reason for this has been the limitations of the technology. Of course that has changed with the iPhone and the release of other smart phones in the last two years. However these phones are expensive and way beyond the budgets of most students.Many m-learning projects have had to lend smart phones to learners. And most schools still ban the use of students own phones in schooltime.

This could be all about to change. Firstly there seems to be a growing realisation from school and college managers that banning the use of what are effectively mini computers may not be the future way to promote learning. At the same time there are more and more examples of effective practice in using mobile devices in the classroom. Jenny Hughes’ recent blog post on 25 practical ideas for using mobile phones in the classroom is currently the most popular post on this web site. And critically, the price of smart phones is set to fall. In Germany the Palm Pre is on sale for one Euro with a 20 Euro a month contract and the Motorola Droid, named the Milestone in Europe, running the Android operating system is set to go out at the same price. These phones have full support for GPS, wifi etc. and at least in the case of the Milestone, appear less locked down than the iPhone.

Research I have been doing in the UK suggests most young people of 16 and over pay for their own mobile phones from earnings form part time work. Phones are seen as a priority – over and above clothes and entertainment. With this new generation of cheap smart phones it is not difficult to guess that their will be a rapid take up by students. Strangely, gossip suggests that this years most wanted Christmas present is a Blackberry, which is now being seen as a status symbol and fashions statement by school students in the UK.

So – students are getting the phones, teachers are developing the pedagogy. The scene is set to take off. having said all that though, I still think the major impact of mobiles will be for informal learning in work. Advanced mobiles have the potential to allow te recording and reflection on practice in a way we have never yet really been able to do with Technology Enhanced Learning.

For those of you who have not been there, On-line Educa Berlin, which claims to be Europe’s biggest event on Technology Enhanced Learning, is a mix between a party, a meet up, a trade exhibition and oh yes, a conference. this year there were once again over 2000 delegates, which, considering the price of the conference for non presenters is over 800 Euro and the general impact of the recession is impressive. Is e-learning standing up despite financial cutbacks? According to the organisers the largest ‘country group; was the Netherlands, followed by the UK, Finland and Norway – although I don’t know quite what this signifies.

Online-Educa is probably not the place to go for cutting edge research and development. Rather it tends ot rflect what is main-streaming and this make sit all the more interesting. the following is a highly impressionistic account fo this years trends / non trends and general goings-on.

Probably the biggest trend is the movement away from a  focus on VLEs towards looking at the use of social software for learning. And, linked to that, is a growing realisation or concern about the gap between the way (not just) young people are using social software for  communication, leisure, information seeking and learning and the way educational institutions are stumble trying to manage learning through the walled gardens of LMS systems and VLEs. Equally, many speakers pointed out the growing availability of  free resources for informal and self directed learning and the need for institutions to rethink their role and how they facilitate learning. None of this is new. What is new is that the idea has moved from being a fringe or minority viewpoint to at least entering the mainstream educational technology discourse. Indeed, in this respect it is interesting to see the recent Guardian newspaper article by Victor Keegan. Keegan says”

”  … YouTube is developing into a kind of University of the Grassroots. Instead of learning being a top-down process, dictated by institutions and governments, it is evolving into a bottom-up process driven by users.

If you want to learn, say, the Python programming language (often used in mobile phones) then your first move may not be to sign up at a local educational institution but instead to look at one of the YouTube videos and benefit from the reactions of other viewers. Education has been slower than other sectors to respond to the digital revolution but, as elsewhere, the direction is being dictated by users….

It is difficult to predict what effect all this will eventually have on education but it could be profound. It must be questionable whether you need three years to complete a PhD when you have instant access to so many archived books as a result of Google’s book-scanning programme. …But, increasingly, the basic street-wise skills people will need during the digital revolution may more easily, and certainly more quickly, be learned from the People’s University of the Internet than from an academic institution.”

In the sessions I attended, there seemed to be more of a focus on pedagogy or suing technology for tecahing and learning, than using technology as a starting point, as in sessions I attended in recent years. Equally, there was less product placement and less focus on corporate learning than in previous years: whether this is the result of the recession or because of a concious decision by the conference organisers I am not sure.

Last year there was a big buzz around Multi User Virtual environments such as Second Life. The bubble has burst this year: presenters were still enthusiastic about the potential for tecahing and learning but the feeling was that present commercial worlds were just not good enough (in this respect it is interesting that Linden Labs did not even have a stand).

Wandering around the extensive exhibition area there seemed to be little new. One surprising omission was the paucity of attention paid to the potential of mobile devices (apart from Blackboard promoting their mobile platform integration). Despite many of teh delegates sporting their iPhones few seemed to have thought about how they might be used for learning. However, perhaps that just is a reflection of Online-Educa: mobiles have not yet entered the mainstream!