The debate over computer science, digital literacies etc. in the UK is still continuing. And the success of the Raspberry Pi computer – selling out of its first 70000 production run in under a week shows the demand and interest in coding and computers in general.

One driver of the debate is that employers are unhappy with the competence and knowledge of potential employees. But this is not new. Employers have always moaned that job applicants do not have the right skills, aptitudes, attitudes – whatever. And it is always the fault of the schools or universities. Maybe it is time that employers started thinking about their own role and responsibilities for training a future workforce. And that includes the IT industry. Of course curricula need updating. Learning how computers work is probably more of a democratic necessity rather than for employment or the economy. There is a danger that we evolve as a society of consumers essentially controlled by the technology of a few major corporations. You know who they are!

But just tweeking the school curriculum or weeding out production fodder university courses will not solve the problem. The real issue is how we view learning – how we create learning environments outside the classroom and how we value learning that takes place outside the formal education sector.

I like the following thoughtful comments from Chris Applegate on his blogpost ‘Why it’s not just about teaching kids to code‘

Secondly, there’s a spectrum of challenges, but there’s also a spectrum of solutions. It’s not just schools and universities that need to bear the burden. As I said, coding is a practice. There’s only so much that can be taught; an incredible amount of my knowledge comes from experience. Practical projects and exercises in school or university are essential, but from my experience, none of that can beat having to do it for real. Whether it’s for a living, or in your spare time (coding your own site, or taking part in an Open Source project), the moment your code is being used in the real world and real people are bitching about it or praising it, you get a better appreciation of what the task involves.

So it’s not just universities and schools that need to improve their schooling if we want to produce better coders. Employers should take a more open-minded approach to training staff to code – those that are keen and capable – even if it’s not part of their core competence. Technology providers should make it easier to code on their computers and operating systems out-of-the-box. Geeks need to be more open-minded and accommodating to interested beginners, and to build more approachable tools like Codecademy. Culturally, we need to be treat coding less like some dark art or the preserve of a select few.

 

I spend a lot of time at the moment looking at how we can interpret and explain labour market data, especially for use in careers. Universities are a sensitive area of policy in the UK, and particularly in England, with an increase in fees of up to £9000 a year from this September. Inevitably, young people – and parents, are increasingly wondering if it is worth it in terms of future careers.

Strangely the big fall off in applications is from mature students who will be less effected as many of them will not hit the ceiling for repayments of the students loans being made available to pay the fees.

Thus, I suspect, it is perception rather than immediate hard economics which is driving people to apply or not.

Yesterday, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) published a new report – Graduates in the Labour Market 2012 – based on the latest statistics from the Labour Force Survey. And in a very welcome development, they published a video on Youtube to accompany the PDF report. The Guardian newspaper highlighted the main results of the4 report:

More than a third of recent graduates are employed in low-skilled jobs, official figures show.

In the final quarter of 2011, 35.9% of those who had graduated from university in the previous six years were employed in lower-skilled occupations, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said. This compares with 26.7%, or just over one in four, in 2001.

In the same period, the number of recent graduates in the jobs market has grown by 438,000 to around 1.5 million in 2011.

Jobs categorised as low-skilled by the ONS include hotel porters, waiters and bar staff, and retail assistants.

The report may be masking the extent of graduate unemployment however, as the unemployed figure excludes those on work experience or internships many of which are short term and, controversially, unpaid.

The one figure which surprised me in the video was the concentration of graduates in London and the South East. I suspect this reflects the role of the London and the South East as the centre for banking and finance, most of which jobs require a degree. Conversely those regions with a lower percentage of graduates are mainly focused on manufacturing industry. Whilst these industries require skilled workers, degrees may not be so important. I would be very interested to see a comparison between pay and employment of graduates and skilled workers (without a degree – for instance with an apprenticeship). Unfortunately the way in which The Labour Force Survey collects data around qualifications makes it very difficult to make any meaningful comparisons. Yet, especially for young people from working class backgrounds, that may be a key choice for them in coming years.

And whilst the present English government is attempting to increase the number of apprenticeship places, there have been persistent criticism over the quality of those apprenticeship places (see this recent BBC report), with many so called apprenticeships consisting of short courses in the retail and service industries – just those very areas where so many recent graduates are ending up!

Last weekend I had the pleasure to attend the Imaginarium in Romania, an event organised as part of the Restart Education campaign in that country. Restart Education is a partnership between the Romanian American Foundation, TechSoup, CROS and Microsoft, and according to their website “creates a framework for innovation in learning and education – harnessing the power of technology to develop new ‘user’ centric tools for Romanian education. ”

The website goes on to explain their motivation for the project.

Education and the approach to pedagogy are in need of constant innovation and reinvention to keep up with an accelerating pace of change.  The world is shifting from a paradigm based on memorization to valuing abilities to synthesize available data and collaboration.  Thankfully, the tools of the information age that demand new approaches also provide systems for collaboration and consumer led development; offering the opportunity to answer the question of ‘what will make education more relevant and valuable in real time?.’

The event was designed as a mixture between an unconference, a workshop and a game with some 100 participants, mostly young people.

The first session was devoted to exploring a model for the future of education developed by the CROS NGO. In the second session the groups or ‘tribes’ brainstormed ideas for new applications to support learning. That resulted in some 169 ideas which were then grouped and on the second day participants further developed their ideas and made a short pitch around them. At that point I sadly had to leave to catch a plane but I gather there was going to be a vote with the most successful ideas receiving development and marketing support.

I was relying on interpreters so may not have fully understood all of the ideas. Some seemed to struggle to advance their thinking outside present assessment and classroom paradigm but a  number seemed very promising. And most encouraging was the enthusiasm of the participants who had given up a weekend to0 attend the event. I would love to see this model repeated elsewhere and also was left wondering how to get peopel to truly explore more radical models for education.

The organisers had invited Leonard Turtin from Summerhill School, myself, Fred Garnet and Cosmin Alexandru to make short inputs, I guess to try to promote an alternative vision for education.

Clearly this was just the beginning of a longer process and I hope to be able to keep in touch with the development. many thanks for CROS for inviting me (I will write another post on the remarkable structure and activities of the student NGOs in Romania and thanks to to all the people with whom I had such stimulating discussions. I don’t know about the Romanian participants but I came away awed and inspired by the energy and vision of what could be. Now the question is how to realise those ideas.

You can find out more on the Restart Education Facebook page and on Fred Garnett’s blog which he set up for the event.

There seems to be a real buzz developing about the release of the Raspberry Pi computer. This  QR code poster nwas developed by Jonas Butz, a high school student from Germany. But before I go on to look at what the Raspberry Pi is, lest explain why I think it is so important.

There has been a long debate in the UK on what kids should be taught about computers. fairly obviously the ‘old’ curriculum which all too often focused on the ability to use things like spreadsheets or worse still Powerpoint was inadequate and failed to interest many students.

I don’t think the latest government policy of introducing a GCSE (the single subject qualifications students take at around 16 years old) in computing science is really the answer (even with a focus on programming).

I am still worried about how we can move from the idea of digital literacies to critical literacies (although I guess this depend a little on how you define these terms.

And I increasingly feel we should be able to teach kids how not just to hack software and to have a critical understanding of the role of digital technologies in society but also to be able to hack the hardware itself. Steve Jobs always talked about Apple’s aim to be at the interface of engineering and the liberal arts. But in many ways Apple’s closed infrastructure and its obsession with locking down devices (to the extent of even using special screws which cannot be removed without Apple tools) has stopped young people being able to explore hardware and try out their own hardware solutions. Surely hacking hardware is the best way of learning engineering and at the same time thinking about what role technology might play in our societies.

So I am excited by the launch of the credit card sized Raspberry Pi computer which it seems is now shipping at a price of 25 dollars for model A and 35 dollars for model B. OK this is without a keyboard, mouse, monitor or case. But, in my experience, the first thing geek kids do is remove the case from their computer!

This video talks about the Fedora Linux release which is being recommended for the Raspberry Pi.

The ‘About us‘ section of the Raspberry Pi website is modest (take note Apple – and, for that matter, OLPC) in explaining their ambition:

We don’t claim to have all the answers. We don’t think that the Raspberry Pi is a fix to all of the world’s computing issues; we do believe that we can be a catalyst. We want to see cheap, accessible, programmable computers everywhere; we actively encourage other companies to clone what we’re doing. We want to break the paradigm where without spending hundreds of pounds on a PC, families can’t use the internet. We want owning a truly personal computer to be normal for children. We think that 2012 is going to be a very exciting year.

The backlog of work has not been helped by me having flu. But I am back at my desk today. And late Thursday I fly to Romania to speak at a conference organised by the ever inventive CROS

Traian Bruma emailed me to explain the purpose and format of the conference.

“The project’s public name is Restart in Education and the Launch Event it’s called Imaginarium. It’s only 20% a conference, it’s 30% an un-conference because the participants will generate ideas and self-organize around ones that attract them. And it is 50% a creative workshop. We put up a website in romanian: www.restartedu.ro but you can check out you pictures here: http://www.restartedu.ro/cine-vine/

Our aim with imaginarium (the event) is to change the DNA of education in Romania and as George Bernard Shaw put it “The imagination is the begining of creation”. This is why the event is called Imaginarium – because it’s a place devoted to the imagination of the future of education in Romania.

The event is set up like a Game with 4 levels. We thought to have a presentation at the beginning of each Level. If it ok with you, we arranged them this way:

Level 1. Discovering the opportunities

Opened by Leonard – about democratic education; This will help them disconnect the notions of education and industrial schooling model. I think that the Summerhill philosophy about education will inspire them and free their minds to think in a different way about learning and education and to discover that there are opportunities in doing things differently.

Level 2. Creating the Imaginarium – the teams connect oportunities discovered and generate 100 ideas of online platforms
Opened by – Fred; – helping them understand how you can connect new ideas about how people learn with opportunities like technology, laws, demographics or other things similar

Level 3. Idea marketplace – Choosing 20 ideas and 20 leaders with their teams

Opened by Cosmin – about why champion an idea and what the business world needs

Level 4. Shaping Ideas – preparing the ideas so they can be submitted on the restartedu.ro platform and a Pitch Fest at the end with SMS voting and feedback

Opened by Graham – help them start shaping the ideas focusing on the interaction of technology, community, educational philosophy, thinking about the opportunities of different technologies and mashups to create new ways for people to organize themselves, interact and learn.

What we said above are only guidelines. It is not so important to link the talk to the game level as it is to provide inspiration and food for thought. We need them to think as far out of the box as possible.”

This sounds like a lot of fun and a brilliant format that could be adopted elsewhere. I shall report on how it all, goes.

As I wrote only a couple of weeks ago Massive Open Online Courses are here to say. Almost everyday I stumble on notifications for a new MOOC.

Jenny Mackness reports she has “been invited to work with the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development to develop a short MOOC (4-6 weeks) for Educational Developers and all those interested in teaching and learning in Further and Higher Education.”

She goes on to put forward a list of issues in developing the MOOC which may be relevant to others:

• How will an already established and successful face-to-face ’closed’ course translate into a MOOC? What will we be able to keep? What will have to go?
• More importantly how might traditional ways of working/thinking have to change to accommodate MOOC principles – autonomy, diversity, openness and connectedness?
• What technologies/platforms will we use/promote and how will our choices affect our and participants’ abilities to aggregate, remix, re-purpose, feed/forward?
• What assessment opportunities will be offered? How will we manage ‘for credit’ participants?
• Most MOOCs I have been involved in have been at least 10 weeks long. This will be a short MOOC.  What are the issues specific to short MOOCs?

George Siemen’s latest post, based on his talk at TEDxEdmonton, makes for interesting reading.

George says:

Classrooms were a wonderful technological invention. They enabled learning to scale so that education was not only the domain of society’s elites. Classrooms made it (economically) possible to educate all citizens. And it is a model that worked quite well.

(Un)fortunately things change. Technological advancement, coupled with rapid growth of information, global connectedness, and new opportunities for people to self-organized without a mediating organization, reveals the fatal flaw of classrooms: slow-developing knowledge can be captured and rendered as curriculum, then be taught, and then be assessed. Things breakdown when knowledge growth is explosive. Rapidly developing knowledge and context requires equally adaptive knowledge institutions. Today’s educational institutions serve a context that no longer exists and its (the institution’s) legacy is restricting innovation.

George calls for the development of an open learning analytics architecture based on the idea that: “Knowing how schools and universities are spinning the dials and levers of content and learning – an activity that ripples decades into the future – is an ethical and more imperative for educators, parents, and students.”

I am not opposed to what he is saying, although I note Frances Bell’s comment about privacy of personal data. But I am unsure that such an architecture really would improve teaching and learning – and especially learning.

As George himself notes, the driving force behind the changes in teaching and learning that we are seeing today is the access afforded by new technology to learning outside the institution. Such access has largely rendered irrelevant the old distinctions between formal, non formal and informal learning. OK – there is still an issue in that accreditation is largely controlled by institutions who naturally place much emphasis on learning which takes place within their (controlled and sanctioned) domain. yet even this is being challenged by developments such as Mozilla’s Open Badges project.

Educational technology has played only a limited role in extending learning. In reality we have provided access to educational technology to those already within the system. But the adoption of social and business software for learning – as recognised in the idea of the Personal Learning Environment – and the similar adaption of these technologies for teaching and learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – have moved us beyond the practice of merely replicating traditional classroom architectures and processes in technology.

However there remain a series of problematic issues. Perhaps foremost is the failure to develop open curricula – or, better put, to rethink the role of curricula for self-organized learning.

For better or worse, curricula traditionally played a role in scaffolding learning – guiding learners through a series of activities to develop skills and knowledge. These activities were graded, building on previously acquired knowledge in developing a personal knowledge base which could link constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose.

As Peter Pappas points out in his blog on ‘A Taxonomy of Reflection’, this in turn allows the development of what Bloom calls ‘Higher Order Reflection’ – enabling learners to combine or reorganize elements into a new pattern or structure.

Vygostsky recognised the importance of a ‘More Knowledgeable Other’ in supporting reflection in learning through a Zone of Peripheral Development. Such an idea is reflected in the development of Personal Learning Networks, often utilising social software.

Yet the curricula issue remains – and especially the issue of how we combine and reorganise elements of learning into new patterns and structure without the support of formal curricula. This is the more so since traditional subject boundaries are breaking down. Present technology support for this process is very limited. Traditional hierarchical folder structures have been supplemented by keywords and with some effort learners may be able to develop their own taxonomies based on metadata. But the process remains difficult.

So – if we are to go down the path of developing new open architectures – my priority would be for an open architecture of curricula. Such a curricula would play a dual role in supporting self organised learning for individuals but also at the same time supporting emergent rhizomatic curricula at a social level.

John Naughton is one of the most thoughtful of mainstream newspaper writers on new media. Although aa academic at the UK Open University, his regular Guardian newspaper column covers a wide range of different issues.

His article yesterday, entitled Welcome to the desktop degree…, predicted the end of the road for the universities in sitting back and hoping their monopoly on accreditation would guarantee an unending throughput of students.

If all the world’s stored knowledge can be accessed from any networked device, and if the teaching materials and lectures of the best scholars are likewise available online, why should students pay fees and incur debts to live in cramped accommodation for three years?

John goes on to say:

Some things have happened recently that make one think that perhaps the water might be reaching boiling point for traditional universities. The key development is a set of three courses created by Stanford University academics and colleagues in three subject areas: machine learning, database design and artificial intelligence. What makes these significant is that they are: intellectually demanding; free; presented entirely online; taught by world-class academics; and inclusive of assessment as well as tuition.

160000 students from 190 countries signed up to Stanford’s “Introduction to AI” course” , with 23000 reportedly completing.

Only three years ago there was a debate at the F-ALT fringe event at ALT-C on whether MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) were merely a passing fad. I can’t remember the results of the vote at the end of the debate but can remember that there was considerable scepticism. The truth seems to be that the MOOC model has taken hold. My only concern is that in adopting such a model for large scale commercial application by large and often private American universities, the values and dedication of people like Stephen Downes and George Siemens who pioneered the early MOOCs will be lost and such courses will just become an industrial treadmill for students.

The main reason I have been so quiet on this blog in recent weeks has been the European bidding season.

Pontydysgu receives no regular funding and although we have some small consultancy contracts and do some teaching, the majority of our income is from project work. In the past, we had considerable funding from various UK agencies, this largely dried up with the onset of the recession and government cutbacks. This, we have become more reliant on funding from the European Union.

There are two main programmes for education and training in Europe, the European 7th Framework research programme and the Lifelong Learning Programme. The Research Framework funds larger projects than the LLL, but has historically been more competitive.

For both programmes, the application process is not straightforward, requiring completion of long forms and documents. In general both programmes are targeted towards innovation, however defined, and both tend to set priorities based on current EU policy directives. Both also require multinational project partnerships. Both have been on call recently – involving many hours of work to develop proposals.

In the past, the reality was that one or perhaps two partners would prepare the project requiring only limit input from other project members. And whilst this is still sometimes the case things are changing fast. For large and c0mplex projects especially in the Technology Enhanced Learning field expertise is needed from different disciplines and from people with different knowledge and skills.

Technology for distance communication and for research has allowed the dispersed and collaborative development of project proposals to become a reality. We have recently submitted a large scale proposal to the Research Framework IST  programme on learning in Small and Medium Enterprises. This project has some 16 partners drawn from I guess around ten countries. And whilst the input and hard work of the coordinator was central to the proposal, the work was undertaken collaboratively with many of the partners making a major input.

What tools did we use? Google docs were used for collaboratively producing earlier versions of our ideas. Doodle was important for setting dates for meetings. Flashmeeting was used extensively for fortnightly meetings of partners (in the latter stages of the proposal weekly or even daily meetings became the norm). Skype was also used for bilateral meetings. And Dropbox was used as a shared file repository. Dropbox proved to be a little problematic in producing somewhat confusing conflicted copies which then has to be edited together. But overall the system worked well. I think what is important is that the tools do exist. And we do not need any big research infrastructure, rather what is needed is the imagination to share through the use of everyday productivity and social software tools.

And it seems to me that if we are able to use such tools to develop a complex and collaboratively produced research proposal, the same tools can be used for collaboration between learners or for small businesses. The barrier is not so much usability fo the applications themselves, but a willingness, understanding and appreciation of how to collaborate!

I haven’t been posting as much as I would like lately. This is due to the European project bidding season (more on that soon) and due to a lot of work on the Webquest 2.0 project (about which I have been intending to write). Anyway, here for starters is an abstract written by Maria Pedrifanou and myself for the ECER 2012 conference.

Developing Collaborative Blended Learning and Knowledge Development in SMEs through Webquest 2.0

Whilst educational technology has been adopted for use in large enterprises, research suggests there is little use of ICT for learning in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) (Attwell, 2007). One reason for this may be the limited provision of Continuing Professional Training opportunities in SMEs. Yet SMEs are seen as critical for economic growth and the creation of employment and rapid technological change and changes in materials, ecological and quality requirements and changes in the organisation of work require the development and deployment of new competences.

Through a European Commission funded Transfer of Innovation project, Webquest 2.0, the authors have developed and are piloting a new pedagogic approach to CPD in SMEs.

The name ‘webquest’ is comprised of two parts: a) ‘Web’ – to indicate that the World Wide Web is used as the primary resource in applying, analysing, synthesising and evaluating information, and b) ‘Quest’ – to indicate that a question is presented within the webquest, which encourages learners to search for new meaning and deeper understanding (Pelliccione L. and Craggs G.J., 2007).

Webquest 2.0 activities stake advantage of the possibilities that current Web 2.0 technologies offer and are based on a revised Webquest framework created for teachers and trainers.

The aim is to develop effective, complex, authentic learning and training environments. Trainers should be able to design and develop their own content and generate learning materials that can help their trainees and can also be shared with others.

The development of the Webquest 2.0 approach is based on the Collaborative Blended Learning Model (CBML) (Perifanou, 2011). There are four key elements to the model. Firstly the model is based on the idea that Webquest activities can be undertaken face to face, in a blended model of face-to-face and online learning, or purely on line. Secondly it is based on a mix of individual and small group activities which collectively allow participants to explore a larger question or theme. Thirdly the Webquest should generate outcomes which can form an organisational learning resource for a community of practice beyond the initial learning activities. Finally the webquests are based on a seven-stage model – Learning Circles – which both scaffolds learning and provides templates for trainers to create webquests.

The model and the webquests are being piloted with SMEs in Poland, the UK and Sweden.

Methodology

In the first phase of the project the Collaborative Blended Learning model was elaborated resulting in the publication of a research handbook. Based on this model twenty initial webquests were developed in close collaboration between trainers and project partners. Following this, a handbook for trainers was produced and a evaluation framework developed.

The webquests and handbook are currently being piloted in workshops with SMEs in Poland and The UK. This includes workshops piloting the webquests developed in the initial phase of the project and workshops for trainers to produce webquest themselves for use in their organisations.

The outcomes of these workshops will be evaluated, and the research handbook and handbook for trainers revised.

This, in turn, will lead to another round of piloting in SMEs in the late spring of 2012.

The initial webquests utilise a commercial wiki, PB works, as the main technical platform. It is intended to transfer the webquests to an Open Source wiki to minimise costs for deployment by SMEs.

Conclusions / Expected Outcomes / Findings

There are a series of hypotheses which are being tested through the project.

Firstly, the project is developing an updated Web 2.0 approach to webquests seeking to scaffold learning in a Web 2.0–enhanced, social and interactive open learning environment.

Secondly the project is transferring an approach and methodology for learning in a Web 2.0–enhanced, social and interactive open learning environment previously develop din a school based and language learning context for training in SMEs.

Thirdly the project is seeking to develop a flexible approach to learning in a Web 2.0–enhanced, social and interactive open learning environment, facilitating a mixture of Face to face Blended and online learning.

Fourthly the project is seeking to facilitate the development of wiki based learning materials by trainers themselves.

Fifthly the project is seeking to develop an approach to developing organisational knowledge resources for communities of practice though training activities.

The evaluation of the initial workshops are extremely positive. The paper will be based on a full evaluation of the project activities and will explore the success or otherwise of our initial hypotheses.

References

Attwell, G. (2007) Searching, Lurking and the Zone of Proximinal Development: e-learning in Small and Medium Enterprises, Vienna: Navreme

Pelliccione, D. L., & Craggs, G. J. (2007). WebQuests: an online learning strategy to promote cooperative learning and higher-level thinking. Paper presented at AARE Conference, 2007.

Perifanou M. (2011) Web 2.0 – New era of Internet tools in learning and teaching Italian as a foreign language – WebQuest 2.0 activities and  Collaborative Blended Learning Model. Proposals of blended learning. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Athens.