Jen writes “Graham – I think your blog should have a space for a ‘sponsored vid of the week’. This is mine for next week.” For me, this song by the great Pete Seeger is the ultimate comment on our education systems – and wonderful slides to go with it.
Like many readers of this blog, I guess, I will try out anything new. I have loads of accounts with different services – so many I forget them. Just occasionally, something sticks. I use Twitter, Diigo and Skype everyday. Slideshare and Flickr are pretty indispensable. The problem is that we get sucked into thinking everyone else does the same. And it isn’t so. Only yesterday one of my friends skyped me very happily. It was his first skype call. he was amazed at the video.
And it gets more difficult in projects with non techy researchers. Many are not just not used to using technology. Most do not feel confident. The big breakthough for me has been using the UK universities Flash meeting application. This is an excellent service, provided for free by the Open Content Learning Space project. I have used Flash meeting with three projects now. The learning curve is always similar. the first meetiong is always hard with people uncertain of how to use headphones, how to enter a meeting and all that. The second is easier with some ability to talk about issues and nowhere near so many dropping out with techncial problems. The third meeting they all get a webcam together and start performing. And the joy is not just the use of the application to allow for ‘virtual’ on-line meetings. It is that people begin to see the value of new technologies to help them in their work. And they become so much more confident in using the technologies. They lose their fear. And, at that point, they are prepared to go a little bit further into the unknown, trying out new applications and ideas.
There are so many conferences at them moment it is hard to know what to go to. But this workshop is on a theme close to my heart and I have agreed to join the programme committee. Here is an abridged version of the call for papers.
“A change in perspective can be certified in the recent years to technology-enhanced learning research and development: More and more learning applications on the web are putting the learner centre stage, not the organisation. They empower learners with capabilities to customize and even construct their own personal learning environments (PLEs).
These PLEs typically consist of distributed web-applications and services that support system-spanning collaborative and individual learning activities in formal as well as informal settings.
Technologically speaking, this shift manifests in a learning web where information is distributed across sites and activities can easily encompass the use of a greater number of pages and services offered through web-based learning applications. Mash-ups, the ‘frankensteining’ of software artefacts and data, have emerged to be the software development approach for these long-tail and perpetual-beta niche markets. Core technologies facilitating this paradigm shift are Ajax, javascript-based widget-collections, and
microformats that help to glue together public web APIs in individual applications.
In a wide range of European IST-funded research projects such as iCamp, LTfLL, LUISA, Palette, and TENcompetence a rising passion for these technologies can be identified.
This workshop therefore serves as a forum to bring together researchers and developers from these projects and an open public that have an interest in understanding and engineering mash-up personal learning environments (MUPPLEs).”
Can you resist a MUPPLE? Want to find out more? See http://mupple08.icamp.eu for more details.
TOPICS OF INTEREST (but not limited to):
* Architectures:
e.g. from cross-domain java scripting
up to to embedding of pedagogy
* Learning Models:
e.g. Activity Models, Environment
Design Models, including their theoretical bases
* Learning Services:
e.g. Concepts and Demonstrators for recombinable
learning services
* Authoring:
e.g. editors, user-interfaces for mash-up creation,
drag&drop mash-up creation, in-place editing
* Data formats:
e.g. microformats, new data models for
fragmented data such as streaming data, recombination models
needed to establish data interoperability
* User Interfaces:
Concepts, Metaphors, Workflows
* Mash-Up Strategies:
cooperative, value-chain oriented, master
and slave
* Development Methodologies: for building and sustaining communities
and services, including analyses of success factors, constraints,
characteristics of user uptake including long-tail requirements
engineering and software development
I am a big fan of radio. As regular readers will know I think it is the coming media And my favourite station is BBC Radio 4. For variety, production values, imagination and innovation, radio doen’t come better. Sometimes I listen live but mostly I listen on the web based iPlayer. The iPlayer makes programmes available for up to a week after they have been broadcast.
Yesterday I listened to “Will you still love me tomorrow.” This was a brilliant history / social commentary on the girl groups of the late 1950s and 1960s. It is a fascinating programme telling not only of the influence of these groups on the evolution of music and especially the influence of the girl groups on the Beatles, but of the social impact in terms of identities. For the first time women talked directly of their feelings and sexuality. And many of the women were black at a time when in the USA black musicians still were restricted by the colour bar. At a time when music in the USA tended to be dominated by local bands with different musicians producing cover versions of the same song in different states, the girl bands achieved national (and international) status.
This was a great history programme, exploring a subject which has previosuly been forgotten. It has the power to inform our thinking of the past and of the future of culture and society. But in a few days it will be gone, removed from the iPlayer and consigned to an unaccessable archive. This is ridiculous. It is as if a book was published and placed in libraries – only for all copies to be withdrawn after a week.
It is not only the BBC’s fault. They, as much as anyone else, are the victims of the stupid copyright laws. But surely the BBC can do more to support open access. Yes – I know that it is perfectly possible to record programmes – if you are prepared to break the law and have a little bit of knowhow (I have recorded this programme). But may people do not know how to do this and anyway may not stumble on the programme during the one week window of availability.
Surely something can be done. It is not just a question of open educational reources – this is our history which is being locked away.
NB Don’t forget to listen while the programme is still available.
Pekka Kamarainen has written an interesting series of blog posts looking at European research in Vocational Education and Training and focusing the ‘European dimension’, ‘interdisciplinarity’ and ‘innovation.’
In his post on innovation ne draws attention to the limited development in the use of technology for vocational education and training. I think he is right in saying one of the problems is the European Commission obsession with big pictures. It seems to me there is little focus on what is actually happening about teaching and learning – and especially on how learners are using technology and how we might help them. Projects funded by the EU tend to focus on yet more digitalisation of learning materials, yet more on-line handbooks and endless projects on introducing VLEs.
Truly innovative projects tend to be lost in the dross. And the European Commission’s obsession with administration has blinded them to the need to create communities to share innovation.
Furthermore the structures of the programmes have effectively excluded enterprise participation. Whilst VET research is important, so too is the involvement of teachers and trainers – practitioners – in the processes of development. All too often European projects are comprised of reseachers talking about teaching and training but with little or no experience of practice.
I do not know how we can overcome these problems. I have little faith in the European Commission. The best practices seem to have come from bottom up networks – for instance by language teachers – which can survive the episodic nature of funding support and who share a passion for what they are doing.
One of my standard lines in presentations on Web 2.0 is that as young people increasingly use the internet to learn, to communicate and to create, education systems and institutions are at best bewildered and at worst downright hostile to such activities.
It could not better be illustrated than by a recent post to the Becta ICT Research list serve:
“Can researchers point out how to stop students/pupils using hand-held devices in the classroom ? Recent THES article on texting while there’s a lecturer speaking point to this being perceived as “mildly rude” – Even on a one-to-one situation nobody seems to have any problems with ring-tones, etc.
Is there a pro-educator device, like the mosquito, that we can switch on to block cell phones/blackberries/iphones ?”
It seems that half the time institutions and teachers bemoan the lack of access to technologies – and then spend the other half working out how to block learners from using their own devices and applications for communicating and sharing knowledge!
I spent an evening last week with Jenny Hughes gathering together a selection of videos for the front page slot on this site for the next six or so weeks. And we have some great videos for you. If you have any ideas of a video we should feature please email me or leave a comment. But please do watch this one. As Jenny says”If Berners Lee invented the enabling technology, this was the guy who invented the idea!”
I like this from Cristina Costa who uses Skype in much the same way as I do: “We could create a skype chat log ( this is a feature quite unknown by skype users, but this has become the main communication channel of a group of webcasters I belong to, and it is incredible how the chat has grown and how we have bonded together. Apart from our blogs we keep this skype written chat open and include new people every time someone asks to join us. It is basically an ongoing IM conversation – every time someone has a question, an idea, etc they just type something in that chat log and the others will automatically receive it when they come online. In other words, what it allows us is to engage in a mix of real time and asynchronous communication).”
The European Commission funded Bazaar project was set up to look at the use of Open Source Software and Open Content in education. The project ended in December, 2007. As ever the work of compiling the reports and different outcomes of the project takes a little time after a project. One output is a new report “BAZAAR Project Scenario Papers “. This report is based on a scenario setting exercise and two workshops – one entitled How Dude -where’s my Data and the other on Personal Learning Environments. However the scenario setting exercise went further and included:
The report – which is 41 pages long – is attached below.
Here is an excerpt on short term scenarios for social software in education.
“These short term scenarios are a vision of a future that incorporates the use of social software for knowledge sharing, capability development and education and training delivery. They are presented in order to gauge an understanding of ‘how it could be’ if social software was more widely adopted by education practitioners. This future is very close!
Social software will force us to completely re-think our business and delivery models for many activities. It’s already happening in the media and many other industries from telecommunications to music and book-selling. Usage of social software is way beyond how people learn – it is about how organisations see themselves and how they do business.
Integral to the visions of the future is the realisation that the ‘Generation Y’ is a significant part of that future. They are already engaging with social software and making connections and sharing knowledge. The ‘Generation Y’ is a significant driver in the uptake of new technologies, along with business in its quest for efficiency. Organisations and education need to ‘catch up’.
The sense of urgency for change is perhaps being forced by the convergence of the changing nature of working and learning in a knowledge era and responding to the needs of the ‘Generation Y’. This generation are natural multi-taskers (or, at least, very good fast-switchers). They innately use technology to communicate within and outside of their working lives.”
I thoroughly recommend this report for anyone interested in social software, open source, open content and so on….
Download the scenarios report here.
I was chatting with Jen about her guest blog post on identities. And we got talking about the different avatars she has to represent her different identities. So she showed me a selection. And emailed me a copy of some of them. Here they are. Cute or what?
Cyborg patented?
Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a “conversational chatbot of a specific person” created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.
Racial bias in algorithms
From the UK Open Data Institute’s Week in Data newsletter
This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.
Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years
Via The Canary.
The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).
Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.
The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.
Quality Training
From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.
Our Wikispace for teaching and learning
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We will be at Online Educa Berlin 2015. See the info above. The stream URL to play in your application is Stream URL or go to our new stream webpage here SoB Stream Page.