No real time to blog today – much too much admin to allow such trivial things! But I couldn’t resist giving myself a short break from the spreadsheets to comment on two of today’s twitter memes.

The first is the draconian new Conditions of Service released by Facebook. As Chris Walters points out anything you upload to Facebook can now be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

“You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.”

That language is the same as in the old TOS, but there was an important couple of lines at the end of that section that have been removed:

“You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”

Furthermore, the “Termination” section near the end of the TOs states:

“The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.”

The second is the goings on in New Zealand where the protest against the Guilt Upon Accusation law ‘Section 92A‘ that calls for internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny has led to a viral campaign to black out avatars on social networking sites.

Is it it just that the law is an ass? Or is it that legislators are quite happy to take action to prevent individuals sharing files, sharing ideas and creating new works, but bow down to the real pirates – the Facebooks of the world. Money still counts when it comes to the law.

I am an avid list maker. And over the years I must have tried about twenty different software applications for making lists and tacking to do items. I think the longest any of them have lasted has been a week before I have returned to the tried and tested technology of the back of an envelope.

But now – I think – I have finally found a software programme which works. Remember the Milk is fabulous. What makes it different from all the others? For one thing being an online application it means I can use it from any of my computers. Google Gears allows it to be used off line. And there is a very cool app for my ipod. But the best thing of all is how little it demands. Yes, there is plenty of add on, on demand functionality – notes, completion dates, contacts, urgency etc. But if you just want to add a task and leave it all that the system is quite happy. Software which works anywhere and with any device and that does what you want it to. Amazing – whatever next.

This is a response to Peter Lake’s blog post, since I am not able to submit my comment in his blog.
Peter is being cautious about the social networking phenomenon. And I don’t blame him. There’s a lot going on and the opinions are diverse. But I share the opinion that to form our own ideas […]

With the proliferation of feature rich social software, the choice of tools is a frequent conversation when talking about teaching and learning. There has been less attention paid to the use of social software for research. So much so that I frequently find that even researchers in Technology Enhanced Learning are not using – or even aware of – basic tools like Skype and Video conferencing for communication and collaboration.
Why should this be so? It seems to me that excepting explicitly collaborative projects – such as those funded by the European Commission – most research is trundling on in a traditional way – individual offices, individual researchers, small geographically based research teams, papers in refereed journals, dissertation defences etc.
Maybe such traditions are good. Perhaps they promote research values and scholarly endeavour. But I think it would be worth re-looking at some of these traditions and considering how the changing practices in teaching and learning – and particularly the use of technology based tools for collaboration – might impact on how we undertake research in practice.

The education system does not work

Last week in a post entitled “If PLEs are Incompatible with the System, how do we Change the System?”, I argued that our present systems are unable to keep up with the requirements of society and of industry for learning and knowledge development.  Curricula cannot keep pace with the speed of technological and social innovation and the skills and knowledge required by today’s technology cannot be delivered through a rigidly sytematised, market led educational system.  Present education systems cannot support lifelong learning and it will cost too much to extend the present model of institutional education to deliver the learning required by the present phase of capitalism.I could – and should – have added that in many countries there is still not free access to basic education – let alone to higher education. Even in advanced economies such as the UK students are expected to contribute towards the cost of their education resulting in many leaving higher education with large debts. There is an assumption that they will do this because of the premium this places on their earning power but research shows this premium to be eroding. And such a premium is based on the differential between them and those without higher education; if everyone has equal access to learning then such additional income would disappear.

An emergent alternative

If the present systems cannot be extended to deliver education for all and lifelong learning is there an alternative? I believe we have an emergent alternative based on the use of new technologies and on radical changes in pedagogy.

Open Educational Resources

Lets start with learning materials or educational resources. We are moving from a position of scarcity to one of abundance through the rapid development of Open Educational Resources and internet based media. Books, videos, audio,learning materials, research papers, journals can all be accessed through the internet. Critically the development of cheap sub laptop computers and of handheld devices (plus the soon to emerge, cheap electronic book readers) and increasing access to internet access, provide a wealth of easily accessible educational resources. Such media are socially and economically sustainable through the very numbers of people contributing to their development and publication. There are still issues over quality and discovery but these issues are far from unresolvable.

Social Networks

Secondly, social networks allow us a forum and social space for shared and peer group learning. We are no longer dependent on the classroom based expert learning model of the past. Just by following Twitter isit is possible to find every day streamed conferences and seminars with free online access. More importantly teh culture of free and open education is spreading. A number of educational social networking sites allow anyone to offer courses and anyone to attend. Whilst some are based on business models involving fees, it seems more likely we will move in the direction of free online education. Early Open Educational resource sites are increasingly looking at enhancing teaching and learning provision to support the materials they are posting online.But most critically, social networking allows us to find and collaborate with people who share a similar interest – and that can include a similar interest in learning. As early as 1970, Illich put forward a vision that people would send a postcard to a central address expressing there learning interests and that a mainframe computer would match up their interests with others and arrange them a meeting with such people. Now that process can be expidited through online social media and geographical location technologies could allow us to meet up face to face with those people with similar interests in our geographical vicinity.

Curricula

One of the barriers to such self driven and social learning has been centrally controlled and regulated curricula. Here too, the use of social media is leading to new ideas of community driven, emergent curricula based on the model of the Rhizome. Learning will not so much be driven by enrolment on a officially prescribed course or curricula, but in participation in learning as part of a community of practice where bodies and tenets of knowledge are changing, emergent and transparent.

Participation in courses and programmes of learning also has a social element. But here too, we have an alternative model. Massive On-line Open Courses (MOOCs) offer a model for the scalable delivery of courses and programmes, and more importantly for the organisation of social interaction around such courses, both online through blogs, wikis, online seminars, internet radio, MUVEs etc. and face to face through geographically located study groups and circles.

Personal Learning Environments

A further piece in the jigsaw is the move towards Personal Learning Environments. PLEs are important in allowing individuals to organise and manage their own learning, regardless of where that learning takes place. PLEs can provide a framework for scaffolding and reflection on learning.

Changing the system

Put all the parts together and we have a new model, a model which can extend learning to all those who want it and support lifelong learning. A model which is affordable and scalable. But of course it requires imagination and change to implement such a model.

There are four key changes we need to take.

The first is in the role of teachers. Teachers are important for guiding and supporting learning. Teachers are a precious and scarce resource. Too much to their time at present is pent delivery front of the class learning and lecturing. If we could increase social and peer group learning and free up teachers time, then we should be able to provide open access for teachers to all who require such support.

The second is assessment. present methods and approaches to assessment are one of the biggest barriers to new and more radical pedagogic approaches. If assessment was seen as part of the learning process, rather than as a process of measuring what people do not know, assessment could become an integral and important part of a new system.If education and learning are integrated in society, then assessment can become authentic within everyday living and working situations.

The third is the role of schools and the design of learning environments. The schooling system has become institutionalised. the vast resources used to support and maintain school buildings and facilities could better be used supporting learning within the community. Schools should be opened to learners of all ages providing guidance and support for learning. But schools are not the only place in which we learn. It is widely accepted that much of our learning is informal. Yet we do little to enhance working and community environments to support that learning. The working environment is not juts the physical surrounding but the deign of work tasks and the work organisation. For learning to be effective we need opportunities to put that learning onto action. We need a holistic approahc to learning environments. A positive outcome of deschooling society is to introduce learning in the wider spheres of activity in our societies.

The final change is in accreditation. There is little point in developing learning in the workplace and in the community and encouraging the development of Open Educational Resources and Personal Learning environments, if access to future opportunities is reliant on accreditation which can only be obtained through participation in prescribed courses. Accreditation can and should be based on presentation of evidence of learning and competence, based on our e-Portfolios and participation in learning activities. Of course, this may require some forms of presentation, in electronic and other media and may require expert and peer testimonial. This is not so much of a technical change, but a change in how we view the validation and recognition of learning.

Of course these are radical chnages. But the main point of this post was to say that we have the ideas and the technologies to support an alternative to the present education systems, systems which are failing so many indiviidals and failing society as a whole.

Its been a bit of an event week. Cetis and Emerge held conferences. MirandaNet and the Amplified people held events. I took part in them all to a greater or lesser extent. Online.

Emerge was by invitation. But I turned up at the rest by following urls on shout outs on twitter. Twitter is becoming a professional and social calender.

So far so good. But opportunities for participation and interaction varied greatly. This is partly due to the technologies. From one extreme to the other – Emerge used the Elluminate platform which allows a high degree of particaption whilst MirandaNet had a hand held vdeo camera linked to u-stream. Cetis had no video feed but the event was intensively covered in Twitter and live blogged as well. The Amplified people ambitiously tried to provide four different video streams. With both the MirandaNet and the Amplified event the audio quality was poor. These things happen and I am sure the technology will get better. My only observation would be that whilst people invest a lot of energy into video feeds they seem to ignore the need for high quality micrrophones. Indeed, a preamp to pick up the audio directly would seem a worthwhile investment if people really want to get their event out on the net.

But it is the event organisation or pedagogy which concerns me more. Organising a Blended Event is like organising a belended learningc ourse. You cannot just replace the nromal face to face elements of the course with the smae pedagogci approache son the ineterent. It requires thought and design. And if you really want such a blended prohgramme – rather then just pushing out a video feed of the face to face event – then the design of the event will have to be changed. For Emerge, it was diifcult to see what added value there was for the Face to Face participants. For MirandaNet and Amplified the opportunities for active partication by on-line participants was limited. In some ways the Cetis people who did not stream their conference may have got more interaction through the use of Live Blogging and Twitter than those who did provide a video stream.

We do not really seem to know how to do these things at the moment.

If I get a little time to think about this, I am going to try to start writing some guidelines on how to organise Blended Eevents. But better still, has anyone out there got any ideas?

I am going to be coming back to the subject of innovation in next few days. I have much to say (well that’s not a change) and think the subject is going to become fairly central to the next wave of development of Technology Enhanced Learning. Anyway, returning to a more colloquial use of the word, here are a couple of innovations from today.

The first is technical. Elluminate has brought out a new edition of their conferencing programme with suppport for up to six simultaneous video streams. And they have done it well. Whilst the default is to coarse grey scales to account for slower computers it can be changed to fine colour as in the pciture above. And you can select which stream you wish to see largest. The refresh rate is pretty high wuit little pixalisation. It certainly adds a new dimension to online meetings. Indded, today we had no problems with the video streaming although as usual the audio provided a few hiccups.

And teh second innovation you ask. Well it is certainly not techncial. Cristina has launched a Facebook group for our LIVE Sounds of the Bazaar broadcasts from Online Educa Berlin next Thursday and Friday. Oh – had I forgotten to tell you? Yes, we will broadcasting live from the conference at 11.00 CET on Thursday and Friday. Please join us face to face at live at the ICWE stand B54 near the front of the Intercontinental hotel. Or if you cannot make it to Berlin then listen in at http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u . You can also join Cristina in the chat room – details soon. And please join the Facebook group.

I will post tomorrow on more of the unconferencing fun we will be getting up to in Berlin.

Here it is – the podcast of the live radio show.

On Monday we broke new ground with our Sounds of the Bazaar radio show. We produced a special issue of Emerging Sound of the Bazaar entitled ‘Into the Dragons Den’.  The programme was a fly on the wall special following the progress of a Dragons Den session organised by the Jisc Emerge project. What’s it all about? Emerge supports a range of projects funded by the Jisc Users and Innovation programme. The projects are mainly focused on developing social software for use in education. Part of the support process has been through a four stage development model. As part of that model, at different times during the project development, project developers get invited to a session where they are quizzed by ‘Dragons’ on the progress of their project.

The Dragons Den session featured on Sounds of the Bazaar podcast is the Preview project which is developing and piloting models for Problem Based Learning in Second Life. Maggie Savin-Baden represented the project. Paul Bailey and Chris Fowler were the dragons.

I’m not sure the Dragons roared. In fact, I think Maggie slayed the Dragons. But judge for yourself.

As always many thanks to all those who took part in the programme including our phone in guests. Production and music by Dirk Stieglitz. (NB – don’t be offput by the volume on the first minute – I got overexcited).

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Another post on the IPTS seminar on Learning 2.0 in Seville. This workshop was interesting becuase it brought togther researchers and practitioners from all over Europe. And, somewhat to my surpise, there was a fair degree of consensus. We agreed social software provided many opportunties for creating, raher than passively consuming learning. We agreed that learnng opportunities were being developed outside the classroom. We even agreed that the locus of control was switching from institutions to the learners and that this might well be a good thing. We agreed we were moving towards individual learning pathways and that learners needed to be supported to finding their pathways.

We agreed that the context of learning was important. Mobile learning would become increasingly important with the development of context sensitive devices. (Also see Serge Ravet’s post on User Generated Content or User Generated Contexts).

But there were also limits to the consensus. Whilst there appeared agreement on new roles for teachers, no-one was sure what that role was?

Much of the discussion centred on the scaffolding of learning. How much support did leaners need and how much of that support would come from teachers?

Neither were participants agreed on the future role of institutions. More critically, was Learning 2.0 something which happened outside the school, and had only a limited impact on institutional practice, or did it pose a fundamental challenge for the future of schooling?

There was even greater disagreement over curriculum. Should there be a curriculum for basic skill and knowledge that everyone should learn? Did learners need a basic grounding in their subject before theyc oudl develop their own learning pathways? Who should define such a curriculum? What was the role of ‘experts’ and who were they anyway?

And perhaps the greatest disagreement was over assessment and accreditation. Many of us felt that we needed to move towards community based formative assessment. Employers, we said, would be more interested in what people were able to do than formal certicates. Others, pointing to occupations such as doctors and plumbers felt there should be some form of standards against which people should be assessed and accredited.

A final comment on the form of the project. Although the work is about Learning 2.0 the present form of the work is decidedly Research 1.0. This research is important enough that it needs to be opened out to the community. It seems a wiki is being d veloped and when it is up I will blog here about it. In the meantime here are some of the photos of the flip charts used for brainstorming around different issues at the workshop. I will pass on any comments on this post to the project organisers.

There are some interesting issues kicking around at the IPTS workshop on the impact of Web 2.0 innovations on Education and Training in Europe.

there are plenty of examples of innovative practice. But there is little example of any findamental change at either a systems level or even at the level of the institution. This raises a whole series of questions:

• is it possible to change pedagogic processes and improve opportunities for learning through the use of social software within the present system?
• or as Roberto has just said what is the disruptive technology which can spark such chnage in peoples lives.

It may be that such change will not origin within the education system but will happen from human interactions in the wider communities through different ‘value propostions’ – through ideas, approaches and technologies which add value to people lives.