Some time ago I read the transcript of a speech by John Seely Brown on Learning, Working and Playing in the digital Age. In the speech Seely Brown talked about how young people used the web as bricolage.

I have cited this in quite a few papers. Jenny Hughes was reviewing one of the papers for me and objected to my citing the idea of bricolage to Seely Brown. Bricolage, she said, was a key idea in Levi- Strauss’s thinking amongst. I had fogotten about this but Jenny had not. She gave me a copy of a book called “Introducing Levi Strauus and Structural Anthropology” by Boris Wiseman and Judy Groves. It is a great book and it has pictures and cartoons – I love these easy introduction books. And indeed there is a section on bricolage:

“To describe the functioning of the logic of the concrete – the essence of a pensee sauvage – Levi-Strauss usesd an unusual analogy. The logic of the concrete he says is the mental equivalent of bricolage – intellectual D.I.Y.

Levi-Strauss’s notion of briclolage has many different applications for all of those from anthropologists to literary critics and philosophers, who have recognised themselves in his portrait of the bricoleur and drawn their own lessons from it.

Levi-Strauss contrasts the work of the bricoleur to that of the engineer, and uses this opposition to characterise the two modes of understanding which underlie, repsoectively, primitive science and modern science.

At the same time, he also applies his concept of bricolage to myth, thus opening up the whole question of its specific reference to an understanding of the processes of artistic creation.

This is how the bricoleur works.

Unlike the engineer who creates specialised tools and materials for each new project that he embarks upon, the bricoleur work with materials that are always second hand.

In as much as he must make do with whatever is at hand, an element of chance always enters into the work of the bricoleur.

Levi Strauss draws two analogies with myth. First, considered in its genesis, myth, like bricolage, is an assembly of disparate elements: it creates structures (i.e. narratives) out of events.

Second, myths are always constructed out of the disarticulated elements of the social discourses of the past. In this too they resemble bricolage.

The bricoleur is in possession of a stock of objects (a “treasure”). These possess “meaning” in as much as they are bound together by a set of possible relationships, one of which is concretized by the bricoleur’s choice”.

I have been increasingly interested in unearthing alternative design principles to that of instructional design. It seems to me Levi-Strauss has written the definitive guide to using Web 2.0 and learning. I have an aspiration – to be a true bricoleur.

The issue of data ownership and control is becoming a regular theme on this blog. Witness my rant against the UK governments development of am electronic database to track every teenager from the age of 14, recording their personal details, every exam result and exclusions. The database is intended to include a CV.

I had an interesting talk with Margarita Perez-Garcia last Friday. Margarita led the European Kite project. Rather than providing a centralised database for a CV, outside the control of the leaner, the Kite project has developed a plug in version ofht eEuropean CV format. The project has developed the plug in for three systems – WordPress, Elgg and Dotclear. It is available under a GPL lisence and is compatable e with the HR-XML standard.

I think this is a great project. Why?

• It puts learners in control of their own data
• It is useful – data only needs to be added once and users can decide what data is displayed in any particular instance
• It is based on a ‘bottom up’ approach to standards (using what works)
• It is not difficult to see how the work could be further extended
• and – of course – it is open source.

One of the reasons I like this so much is that it is a European project which has produced something useful. The sowfatre can be downloaded from the labs.Libre tracker.

They don’t make life easy for us do they? I have spent a lot of time trying to persuade people of the liberating potential of technology for learning and then along comes the UK government with this proposal. I can see no educational merit whatsoever in the database. This is all about managing people, not supporting learning. The only bright side is the UK government have never delivered on any of their large scale IT schemes – there seems little reason to thing they will do so this time.

From the Guardian newspaper:

“The government has devised an electronic database to track every teenager from the age of 14, recording their personal details, every exam result and exclusions….The database will be accessible to employers, teachers and training agencies, and will include an online CV. The record will be permanent.
Gemma Tumelty, president of the National Union of Students, said: “We are concerned about the track records of the government on maintaining and safeguarding data. We are also worried about routes of progression – should every slap on the wrist at school count against you for ever? Why should an exclusion matter 10 years on? Surely everyone is allowed a few mistakes. We would worry this would turn into a national ID card.”

A spokesman for the University and College Union said: “The government’s track record of dealing with complex ID systems is far from impressive. We have all done things at school that we are not proud of, but we do not expect them to hold us back permanently in life and nor should they. Such a scheme would not seem to fit with the government’s stated aim of giving everybody a second, third or fourth chance when it comes to education.”

We are constantly thinking of ways to improve this web site. We know we still have some parts to finish – notably the publications. And we have been working on that for the last couple of weeks.

But the bit which has been bothering us is how to represent work in progress. We finally decided we would create two separate sections for publications and research. But we are not a traditional university type research organisation sitting for hours behind closed doors penning a new masterpiece. Most of our work involves close collaboration with others. And as webmeister Dirk pointed out, there is little opportunity for others to contribute to the site at the moment. Neither does the site sufficiently show off the work going on in the community.

So we are now working on a research zone for the site which will not only give access to our own work, but will highlight work by others. How will we do this? We are not quite sure. But it will feature feeds from Stephen Downes’ edublogger list, from Delicious, CiteULike, Slideshare and other social networking applications. We are looking at how we can use yahoo pipes to mash it all up.

And we are investigating how to migrate the site to WordPress MultiUser. With MU we can use the structured blogging forms developed for Freefolio to offer all those who have created an account on the site (with which you can do little at the moment) the opportunity to add content themselves. We are thinking about opening up a reviews section, recommended applications, an events section and more. OK – it is going to take a couple of days. But if you have any ideas on anything you would like to contribute to this web site please get in touch or better still just leave a comment. We especially would welcome ideas on how we can make the site more representative of the community at large.

Oh – one other thing. We manage the content through the categories. the list is getting horribly long. We should have probably split between categories for content management and used a keyword plug in to manage the kind of content. But it is a bit late for that. Does anyone know how we can manage the category list beeter? Can we split it in two? Are there any plug ins?

It is a great pleasure to report what seems to be very good news from elgg. These two extracts form recent posts on the Elgg news blog.

“When Ben Werdmuller stood up at the Elgg Jam 2007, he announced an advanced version of Elgg – version 1.0 – that would come with no features, and allow you to pick and choose exactly which functionality you required on your social web application.  Later the same year, Curverider began talking about Project Searunner, an API-based back-end for the easy creation of distributed web applications.  Today we are pleased to announce that they are the same thing. ”

“From the beginning,

Elgg 1.0 won’t ship with any end-user features; you can think of it as a social application engine that can power all kinds of different sites and applications. In fact, there are three major ways you can use the new Elgg core:

* As a web application in a box, as it always has been.

* As a collection of back-end PHP libraries.

* As a back-end API that you can use as the building blocks of any socially-aware networked application in any language.

With this in mind, who are we to tell you what features you need? The original Elgg codebase came with profiles, a blog, a file repository, communities and an RSS aggregator. On many of the communities we’ve built, forums or microblogging has been much more popular than blogging (it depends on the audience, but a lot of people don’t enjoy writing mini-essays on a regular basis). What if you want to use those instead? Or you want to use it as the engine for a company intranet, or an online game, or a virtual learning environment?

By taking out the features and letting you pick and choose exactly what you want, Elgg becomes a much more powerful system. The plugin system, incoming and outgoing APIs, data import/export and documentation are the major features, as well as user handling and social networking logic. Everything else is optional. In fact, we intend to release the core to download before any extra features are even developed.

On the web as a whole, this reflects how applications have evolved. The era of the all-encompassing, unfocused social network has come and gone; Elgg allows you to build systems that are specific to a particular market or audience, with exactly the features you need.”

If you are worried about maintaining all the features from the ‘old’ Elgg, Ben says that will now be maintained by Misja Hoebe as Elgg Classic.

I recently greatly enjoyed reading an essay by my stepdaughter, Arddun Arwyn. Not quite sure what the title was but the essay was about ” the late Victorian civic project” to civilise the streets of Methyr Tydfil, then a fast growing iron town in industrialising South Wales and seen by contempory middle class observers as a den of lawlessness and immorality.

Arddun cites Croll who bases his analysis of the civic project in Merthyr on Michel Foucault’s theory that power is “dispersed through a range of complex social networks” and is not held by one dominant group in society.

Reading the essay, I got drawn into thinking about the parallels between attitudes towards the social networks of the streets of Merthyr and open social networks. In both cases attempts to control the open spaces are based on providing walled gardens and on promoting new ideas of private property. Anyway here are a couple of extracts from the essay – hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

“In the late Victorian era it is evident that there was a distinctive shift the meanings of ‘public’ and ‘private’ space and the activities deemed to be acceptable in these spaces. If we refer to court records from Merthyr in the latter part of the century we can see evidence that demonstrates this. A boy came before the courts for playing bat and ball in a Merthyr street, his mother in his defence explained that she herself had played in that street as a child and that there was no other places for children to play. Despite this the boy was fined two shillings for his misdemeanour. Similarly emigrants from rural areas of Wales were learned in the new codes of ‘private’ and ‘public’, which became so important in this era. A William Evans was caught playing quoits in a field belonging to the Dowlais Iron Company and was fined 5 shillings for causing ‘wilful damage’ to the company’s land. Evans explained to the court “‘he came from Cardiganshire, where they were allowed to play were they liked, and having only been in Dowlais for a week, he did not know he was doing any harm.’” Another case which underlines this point is that of two men who were discovered drunk and about to engage in a prize-fight, they walked free as the encounter took place on a privately owned field rather than in a ‘public’ space.

This shift in how the use of ‘public’ space was perceived had a profound effect on the most ‘public’ of spaces, the street.

Andy Croll argues that although the streets were the most ‘public’ and therefore ‘freest’ area of towns “the freedom that defined public space was heavily regulated, through codes and which distinguish between ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ behaviour”3 It became the battle of the ‘public’ to reclaim and regulate what they deemed to be ‘public’ space.4 Codes of street etiquette were in place to ensure that Victorian streets were an area of movement, silence and safety. This would prove problematic if we consider the function of the street to some members of the ‘public’. Martin Daunton’s work into working class areas has concluded that, when working class areas were re-built from courts and allies to open streets the usage of the street by these members of the public reflected their “boisterous and vibrant culture’ which had before been enacted in a ‘private’ area of the enclosed court. Andrew Davies, similarly argues that the street was an integral part of working class sociability.”

“The presence of a vibrant street culture as described by Martin Daunton, was a direct challenge to aspirations of movement, silence and safety ascribed to Victorian thoroughfares by those wishing to ‘civilise’ the streets. Another means of regulating behaviour and ensuring the aforementioned values were sustained was the trend by municipal governments and prominent members of society to provide areas were ‘rational’ recreation could be practised. If we consider Swansea as an example they is much evidence that demonstrates this shift in policy. In the years prior to 1870 municipal governments were reluctant to support schemes that would cost the ratepayers to initiate, however after 1870 the business community experienced a period of prosperity, which obligated municipal governments to provide a wider range of social services for inhabitants. The initiatives undertaken were usually in the form of parks and public libraries. “The Open Spaces Movement” endeavoured, under the leadership of William Thomas, to provide parks and playgrounds in areas of the town were there were “no facilities other than the streets and gutters in which to play.” Similarly the establishment of libraries and other such cultural centres i.e. art galleries, museums, was regarded as an important means of providing ‘rational’ recreation for the working man. The Public Libraries Act of 1866 and the work of campaigners paved the way for the establishment of Swansea’s public library and reading rooms in 1869. We see similar initiatives being completed in Merthyr under the patronage of the Ironmasters.”

The eduspaces closure (or not) saga rolls on. To bring new readers up to speed, just before Christmas Curverider,  the comany behind the popular elgg open source software, announced the closure of eduspaces, which describes itself as the “the world’s largest social networking site dedicated to education and educational technology.”

After several days rather fraught debate in the edublogosphere, Curverider rescinded the closure notice, saying that TakingITGlobal, a Canadian not for profit trust, would take over the service. Sighs of relief all round, albeit with some concerns over the lack of transparency regarding the transfer. And for a time all looked good with TakingITGlobal indicating their desire to establish an advisory board to help them run eduspaces. But, come January, things went quiet again. Then this week a new announcement appeared on the front page of the eduspaces site.
“As announced earlier TakingIT Global will continue hosting the eduspaces.net community. Please login to get redirected to a page where you can indicate if you would like to have your eduspaces.net account transferred to a new home on educatorcentral.org. This option will remain available until February 27th 2008.”

This has raised new doubts. As Josie Fraser says on the site forum:

“…it’s currently not possible to be logged on to the site and not select an option before carrying out any other activity – including referring back to this post to ask for further information. I’ve asked to be migrated across but I would have liked to be able to have given informed consent and understood what this means a little better. The transfer notice refers to another URL – does this mean that all existing links on site will be broken (again)? What happens to links between friends on this site who don’t opt in to joining the, in effect, new community? Was it not possible to come to an arrangement regarding the Eduspaces URL?”

Besides the issue of the domain name change, there now is some doubt over the future platform. Most of us had assumed the eduspaces would continue to be hosted on the elgg Open Source platform. But TakingITGlobal has previously used a proprietary platform for its networking activities. The lack of any communication must lead to speculation that they will in fact not use elgg but will transfer accounts to their own platform. And the educatorcentral domain name referred to in the transfer notice is not yet active. In effect edusapces is being shut down with TakingITGlobal offering a new service for those who previously were part of eduspaces.

So the sorry saga rolls on. As Terry says: “the community is the people, not the technology”. But it seems increasingly clear that eduspaces will no longer be a key part of that community.

I am more and more interested in the different ways people are using the web to tell stories. Jen Hughes is not a regular blogger although her guest spots on this blog are always great. But she is becoming a prolific creator of cartoons and I love the way she weaves different story themes together. This is her latest offering (for non rugby playing country readers the annual Wales against England rugby match is the high spot of the Welsh cultural scene).

I have always been interested in the potential of work based learning. Although much of what I have written about is informal learning, formal work based learning programmes also seem to me to be important. Apprenticeship is probably the largest such organised form of work based learning. And, if speakers at last weeks INAP conference in Vienna are to be believed, apprenticeship programmes seem alive and kicking. Indeed, some countries like Italy, have witnessed a dramatic increase in apprentice numbers in the last five years.That is not to say that apprenticeship training is without problems – especially in those countries which have developed mass university education, like the UK, apprenticeship lacks prestige. Drop out rates are sometimes alarmingly high. Quality of apprenticeships may vary. School or workshop based training may lack authenticity.Apprenticeship programmes are probably strongest in the German speaking countries. In Germany and Switzerland some two thirds of all young people embark on apprenticeship training, in Austria around 40 per cent do so. In Germany and Switzerland occupations prepared for by apprenticeship cover all economicsectors i.e. in craft, industry and trade, liberal professions, and services. In Austria, apprenticeship prepares predominantly for artisan-type occupations and full-time higher level vocational colleges prepare for associate professional and technical occupations. Apprenticeship in the German-speaking dual-system countries is structured by the concept of Beruf and apprenticeship training can only be provided in a recognized occupation. The Beruf or professional occupation is defined by a coherent set of skills that combine together to form both an occupational and a social identity (Steedman, 2005).A major threat to the future of the apprenticeship programmes -and one that is not limited to the German speaking countries is a lack of training places. Moral responsibility to provide training opportunties is no longer sufficient motivation for employers who are concerned at the cost of training. Of course one answer coudl be large state subsidies but this seems hardly realistic.On my way back from Vienna I talked to Lars Heinemann from the University of Bremen who is working on a project called IBB 2010. Lars has just completed a major study into apprenticeship (I will provide link as soon as I have one). Essentially, the IBB project has developed a complex statistical tools for looking at the cost and quality of apprenticeship. Initial results suggest vast differences in the cost. Cost is far lower in the craft trades. The major variable appears to be whether training takes place in a training workshop or directly in the workplace. Where training takes place in the workplace, apprentices contribute more to the production process (or services) and thus the overall cost to the employer is lower. Now the project is looking at what practices could be transferred – both to improve quality and to reduce costs.I think this is important work. Only last week I lambasted UK prime minister Browns announcement that Mac Donalds amongst others are to become awarding bodies for qualifications gained in their workplaces. the reason I guess for this is to address precisely the same problem that faces the German speaking countries – a lack of willingness on the part of employers to provide training. But I think the German answer sounds potentially much more appealing in maintaining broader training programmes and refusing to let companies take over the curriculum.

An interesting article from the Guardian newspaper on teachers in the UK.

“Around 17,000 “substandard” teachers are struggling in classrooms and failing to inspire their pupils, according to the head of the body responsible for upholding teaching standards.

Middle-aged male teachers are a particular worry, and teachers need retraining throughout their careers to prevent them becoming disaffected, Keith Bartley, head of the General Teaching Council for England, said.

……. Bartley said: “It is not unreasonable to assume that in a workforce of half a million there is a proportion that is probably around that 17,000 that are in practice substandard.

“If we want to make more of a difference in more classrooms it’s probably not the incompetent teachers that are the problem. It’s teachers who are struggling with their classrooms day-in day-out – part of that is behaviour management in increasingly difficult classrooms.”
It seems top me a bit odd and not particularly helpful to come up with such a precise figure as 17000 and then justify that by saying it is not an unreasonable assumption. Neither am I sure that the emotive language of failing teachers is the best way to approach a discourse over what more can and should be done to support the practice of teachers. The most likely result of such an approach will be to stigmatise anyone seeking more support. However discussion with teachers and more particularly with trainee teachers suggest there are issues which need addressing. Firstly I am unconvinced that there is sufficient emphasis on applied practice – including classroom management within the teacher training curriculum, at least in the UK. And whilst trainee teachers do undertake placements in schools as well as serve a probationary year, part of which is supposed to include further ,earning with support, anecdotal evidence suggest that the quality of such support is at best highly variable. Neither am I convinced that we have sufficient research on what exactly comprises good practice in the field.

The second point is that all teachers – not only those deemed to be ‘failing’ should have access and time for continuing professional development. Once more form limited knowledge of UK practice, what on-going staff development is available seems all too often to be either concerned with overall school management or with the introduction of of new schemes, assessment programmes etc. once more the assumption is that classroom practice and classroom management will will take care of itself.

Existing progression routes are not helpful. Although Scotland has introduced a Chartered Teacher scheme to reward experienced practitioners, in England and in wales, promotion is through becoming managers outside the classroom.

The problem with statements like Bartley’s – and the inevitable popular press reaction – is that it hinders a proper discussion of any of these issues