Alec Couros and Graham Attwell have been paired together as co-keynotes at the PLE Conference in Barcelona, Spain, July 8-9. The organizers have asked us to do something different than a typical keynote, so we have been thinking about an unKeynote format. In keeping with the theme of the conference (PLEs), we’re hoping that individuals in our network would be willing to help us frame what this might look like.

How the Session is Going to Work:
We have put together a  a list of questions (see below) and are inviting your responses. We will put together a joint presentation based on your slides.

We will present the ‘keynote’ together but will be encouraging participants – both face to face and remotely – to contribute to the keynote as it develops.

Where We Need Help:

1. We’d like you to respond to one or more of these ‘key questions’ found below. We suggest responding through the creation of a (PowerPoint) slide, or creating a very short video (less than 1 minute?). Or, if you can think of another way of representing your ideas, please be creative.
2. We’d like you to provide questions for us. What did we miss? What are some of the important questions for consideration when exploring PLEs/PLNs in teaching & learning.
3. Please send your responses to graham10 [at] mac [dot] com (and you may cc: couros [at] gmail [dot] com) by July 6/10.

Key Questions:

1. With all of the available Web 2.0 tools, is there a need for “educational technology”?
2. What are the implications of PLEs/PLNs on traditional modes/structures of education?
3. What are the key attributes of a healthy PLE/PLN?
4. What pedagogies are inspired by PLEs (e.g., networked learning, connected learning)? Give examples of where PLEs/PLNs have transformed practice.
5. What are the implications of PLEs/PLNs beyond bringing educational technology into the classroom, and specifically toward workplace/professional learning?
6. If PLEs/PLNs are becoming the norm, what does it mean for teachers/trainers (or the extension: what does it mean for training teachers & trainers)?
7. As our networks continue to grow, what strategies should we have in managing our contacts, our connections, and our attention? Or, extension, how scalable are PLEs/PLNs?
8. Can we start thinking beyond PLEs/PLNs as models? Are we simply at a transitional stage? What will be the next, new model for learning in society? (e.g., where are we headed?)

I am afraid words fail me. Whilst the right wing UK DemCon government continues to cut services and welfare benefits to fund the vast payments to the failed banks, the reality is that poverty increases.

This is from a recent report on heal;thy school meals by the official schools watchdog Ofsted and as reported in the Guardiian newspaper:

Parents from these families told inspectors that they often could not afford to pay for a school lunch, especially if they had more than one child. One family, for example, had to arrange for the two children to take turns and eat a school meal on alternate weeks.

Other parents complained about the lack of advice on how to produce balanced but inexpensive packed lunches. Also, little account was taken of the fact that many families whose income was low did not have transport and therefore had to rely on what was available in the immediate locality.

Local shopkeepers were unlikely to stock appropriate food unless they could be convinced of the financial viability of doing so. Unhealthy packed lunches did not necessarily reflect parents’ lack of commitment or cooperation but, rather, a complex set of local circumstances.

Yesterday, Jenny Hughes and I (well, more Jenny than me) made a presentation on syntax to an seminar organised as part of the Rita Kop and Stephen Downes’ Critical Literacies online course. The idea of Syntax is based on Saussurean linguistics and is difficult stuff (at least to me). But it is also extremely interesting. Syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing a sentence. But, of course, it can also be used as a way of studying other areas, including education and training. Much of the presentation focused on the relations between paradigms and syntagms. Syntagms describe the relations between the parts of different paradigms. The sum of the associate elements has a meaning different from the parts and changes the meaning of the parts. As jen said the elements of one paradigmatic set in the presence of another may change into something we don’t know. And, according to Richard Harland, the syntagm is the site of new meaning. Syntagmatic thinking, she went on to say, is called ‘radical transcendence’. And here it gets interesting. Semes are the site of old meaning. The meaning of a single piece of understanding gets left behind – or gets lost on the meaning of the new whole. I am sure that is happening now in our understanding of what comprises or means teaching and learning. As learning becomes ever more embedded in the internet and in escapes from the institution, then both our understanding of the meaning of learning and education and of schooling will change. Schools will become juts a seme – a site of old meaning.

However syntagmatic thinking is also based on the idea focusing not on the novelty of combinations but on the novel act of combining. And I fear that in using technology for teaching and learning up to now we have f9cused on the novelty of combinations of technology and education, rather than look as the novel act of combining technology and learning together.

This post is both a note for myself but also is a trailer. We are working on producing a slidecast of the presentation which I will post here as soon as it is ready.

NB Critical Literacies is a free and open online course. Whilst not as well attended as previous course Stephen has run with George Siemens, it is raising many interesting ideas and is well worth dipping into.

As I guess most of you will know the UK has a new right wing coalition government. As always, being a new government, they have announced a raft of new policy measures including in education. the major tenet of the government policy is to use the financial crisis to impose wide ranging cuts on public services. In the education area, early policy announcements have included allowing schools to opt out of local government control (and the introduction of private sponsorship), cuts  in funding of university places (and strongly rumoured rises in tuition costs), a two year freeze on pay rises, cuts to free school meals and the abolition of the British Education Communication and Technology Agency (Becta).

I think it would be fair to say few of these measures have found favour with educationalists! But how should we react to these policies. especially given that the government is only two or so months old? Perhaps I am old fashioned but I think the only answer is to build a broad alliance to oppose government policies. So I am a little bemused by the following letter, available on the NAACE web site,  signed by a broad coalition of organisations involved in Technology Enhanced Education seeking to enter a dialogue with government education minister Michael Gove:

At a meeting on 4 June 2010 Naace, the ICT Association, brought together leaders from key organisations from across the education system to discuss the future of Information Communication Technology in Education.

Agreement was reached on a joint vision statement. We now circulate this to you and other interested parties. We seek assurances from you that the new government recognises the importance of ICT to learning, to learners, to management, and to the overall success of the whole education system.

The freedoms promised to schools, colleges and beyond by the coalition government provide new opportunities for teachers, lecturers and learners to make the best possible use of ICT to support, enrich and extend learning across and beyond the curriculum, thereby improving achievement, enabling personalisation and ensuring employability.

Responsibility for leadership in this field must be shared between schools, colleges, providers of adult learning, local authorities, industry, and government. If we work together, through membership organisations, subject associations and looser networks and communities of educationalists, technologists and policy makers, we can provide the mutual support and challenge that will be needed if the learners in our charge are to continue to benefit.

When used well and managed wisely, ICT is a powerful tool to ensure that:

• curriculum and pedagogy stay relevant to an increasingly digital world and economy;
• all learners are included, protected, and empowered;
• teachers and lecturers have efficient, effective and economic access to digital resources, together with the tools to create and deploy these resources themselves.

The education system is ripe for the development of new models that:

• maximise the return in learner achievement from investment in ICT;
• support effective pedagogy;
• provide an evidence‐base to inform decision‐making;
• enable efficient procurement of software, hardware, infrastructure, and services through improved market competition and collaborative purchasing;
• assure the quality and independence from commercial or ideological bias of support available for those in leadership roles.

The success of the country depends on the long term strength of the economy and for this, fluency in ICT matters as much as does competence in English and Mathematics. In short, a digitally literate and digitally creative workforce is of vital importance to every citizen, and achieving this demands an entitlement to the best possible use of ICT in education – by learners, by schools, colleges and institutions, and by educational leaders.

We look forward to confirmation that the newly elected government shares our vision for ICT in education, and we look forward to working with government on putting the vision into practice.

Most of the statement seems fairly innocuous although I am not sure it amounts to a ‘vision’. And although I know we have got used to justifying projects in terms of economic goals, I am not happy with phrases like “the success of the country depends…” to say nothing of the statement recognising the opportunities of the freedoms (read cutbacks and privatisation).

I also see the need for dialogue if we are to even defend the present education system let alone provide increased learning opportunities. But to me the real subtext is – we know you are going to make cutbacks but please don’t cut our part of the system. And that is not a constructive dialogue at all.

There’s an interesting aside in an article in today’s Guardian newspaper on the so called problems of plagiarism. Why do I say so called? Whilst I would agree that practices of buying and selling essays are a problem, these practices have always gone on. When, many years again pre-internet days, I was a student at Swansea University, it was always possible to buy an essay in a bar. And I would also argue that a side benefit of cut and stick technologies is that standards of referencing in universities today is much higher than it was in my time as student. Indeed at that time, you were expected to buy your tutors’ textbooks and to paraphrase (plagiarise) their work. Plagiarism is as much a social construct as it is a technological issue.

But coming back to today’s article, reporting on a three day international conference on plagiarism at Northumbria University, the Guardian reports that “The conference will also hear that the problem of plagiarism at university could be reduced if students used “digital storytelling” – creating packages of images and voiceovers – rather than essays to explain their learning from an imagined personal perspective.

Phil Davies, senior lecturer at Glamorgan university’s computing school, said he had been using the technique for two years and had not seen any evidence of cheating. “Students find it really hard but it’s very rewarding, because they’re not copying and writing an essay, they have to think about it and bring their research into a personal presentation.”

Another approach is to focus on authentic assessment – or rather assessment of authentic learning tasks. In this case students are encouraged to use the internet for research but have to reflect on and re-purpose materials for reporting on their own individual research.

In both cases this goes beyond dealing plagiarism – it is good practice in teaching and learning. And I wonder if that might be a better starting point for the efforts of researchers, developers and teachers.

There is an interesting interview with Rob Arntsen, the CEO of MyKnowledgeMap in the latest edition of the Eifel newsletter. Rob was asked to describe his vision of ePortfolios.

“We believe that the term is perhaps too general and becoming overtaken by events as the learning technology market evolves. On one hand I prefer the concept of a person’s individual learning space, such that the individual is in control of what they identify as their tailored learning space, which embraces their social networking space and which allows them to showcase and to grant access selectively.

On the other hand, for obvious reasons, the historic trend behind e-portfolio development has been driven by institutions to primarily address institutional interest in delivering a solution in this area. That requirement is still valid, and so we need to see the concept that allows the “bridge” between an individual in control of their own learning space and the institution’s valid need for some form of consistent method of interlocking with their students learning processes. This is why we are developing Learning Slate, which is an open source development, initially with Hull University and JISC.

……The changes we have seen in the e-portfolio market are many and varied. There has been the growth in use of significant open source solutions such as Mahara, the merging of reflective style portfolios with competency orientated assessment, and the linkage with assessment. I also am starting to get the feel that this space is becoming more important than the traditional LMS/VLE product and may perhaps take centre stage at some point. Generally we are seeing more interest in video content and e-book content alongside other content, and indeed the close integration of video and e-books within e-learning and assessment objects.

Perhaps the most dramatic and rapid change has been the very strong interest in mobile phones, especially smart phones and related technology. I suspect this will continue to evolve quickly with the advent of the i-pad and similar devices.”

Rob’s idea of a learning space is similar to the Personal Learning Environments we have described on this site. And Rob is right when he says “the historic trend behind e-portfolio development has been driven by institutions to primarily address institutional interest in delivering a solution in this area.” But I am not sure why he says this requirement is still valid if students are in control of their own learning in their own learning spaces.

I have been paired together with Alec Couros as co-keynotes at the PLE Conference in Barcelona, Spain, July 8-9. The organizers have recently asked us to do something different than a typical keynote, so we have been thinking about an unKeynote format. In keeping with the theme of the conference (PLEs), we’re hoping that individuals in our network would be willing to help us frame what this might look like. We would like you to write your ideas in the shared Google document. We will review all your ideas, come up with a format and then once more invite your inputs.

The document is open and can be accessed by clicking this link.

Yesterday, together with my colleague Jenny Hughes, I made a presentation to participants in the Critical Literacies course being run by Rita Kop and Stephen Downes as part of their ongoing research project on Personal Learning Environments.

The course blog says: “Technology has brought changes to the way people learn and some “critical literacies” are becoming increasingly important. This course is about these critical literacies. Critical, as the course is not just about finding out how to use the latest technologies for learning, but to look critically at the Web and its underlying structures. Literacies, as it is more about capabilities to be developed than about the acquisition of a set of skills. It is all about learning what is needed to develop confidence and competence, and to feel capable of negotiating an ever changing information and media landscape.”

Our presentation was on pragmatics. Pragmatics, we said is a sub field of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning.

Today we have made a short version of the presentation as a slidecast. In the presentation we explore different ideas about context in education. In the final part of the presentation we look at Personal Learning Environments and how they relate to issues of meaning and context.

The introductory and end music is from an album called Earth by zero-project. it can be downloaded from the excellent Jamendo web site.

For my sins I often am asked to review papers for conferences, books and journals. I think this is fair as a contribution to an emerging community of practice but i can’t say I enjoy the process. I find it very hard to decide what should be the standard and am worried that I am being fair to authors who have obviously invested a lot of time and effort into their research and writing. I struggle even more if the author is writing in a second or third language. How important is the standard of the English? And how much should style count towards the review?

One thing that does annoy me is the throwing around of unreferenced assertions. All these example are taken from papers I have reviewed recently:

“Many researchers say…… ”

“It is unquestionable that…..”

“Most students are…….”

“We have rapidly come to a point where….”

“There is a perception that….”

I like papers with attitude. And papers jammed full of references at the end of every sentence are extremely hard to read. Even so, I think that assertions of this kind need some evidence to back them up. Furthermore what does ‘most’ or ‘many’ mean.

In that respect I like the approach of the Welsh agency, Estyn. The purpose of Estyn is to inspect quality and standards in education and training in Wales. Estyn’s reports follow its guidance for the writing and editing of reports, which is available on the Estyn website (www.estyn.gov.uk). Estyn also publish a table, reproduced below, in the introduction to their reports, showing the terms that Estyn uses and a broad idea of their meaning. Whilst such an approach may seem pedantic, it greatly helps in understanding what they are saying .

Over the last two years I have been lucky to work on a project called Rhizome. Rhizome is a research and development project, funded by Eduserv, exploring the key social and technical elements that impact on the construction of online identities.

The Rhizome awareness report, published today and entitled ‘Digital Identity Matters’ highlights the issues we face when dealing with our online identities. It outlines the design pattern approach that has been used to help define a set of problems and their solutions that all relate to our understanding and use of a digital identity. The material is released as an open access resource and is aimed at contributing to a deeper understanding of digital identity and the impact it can have on the individual and those around them. It will be of relevance to anyone who uses the Internet to disclose personal information about themselves – be it purposefully through the use of social media tools or as a result of work-based professional activities. The report can be downloaded from the Rhizome project web site. The following text is an except from the introduction to the report.

“Our relationship with the Internet is changing. Mobile devices, wireless connectivity, and our increasing virtual presence across multiple social media services have all but collapsed the boundary between being online or offline. Together the virtual and the real form the seamless space in which many of us live out our daily lives. We fashion the self through social interaction, community and network affiliations, and here come to construct our identities as well as interpret the identity of others.
The ease with which individuals can now produce, reproduce and distribute digital content has powerfully shifted the ways in which we think about global connectedness, media access and distribution, social action and the production of knowledge.

Our ability to engage so readily with digital media and online networks is empowering but our resultant actions also make us vulnerable. We suffer the pressures of information overload, time management and, as we argue in this publication, the need to curate our increasingly visible digital lives. The Internet is not a set of static objects but a dynamic network of connected, interacting subjects.

How does our online visibility affect who we think we are and our ability to act with purpose and intent? How should we ethically respond to concerns about the impact of one person’s online behaviour upon the lives of others. These are two of the questions that are explored here.

We focus on a design pattern called ‘Putting Children First’ and two supporting case-stories that describe the dangers of using an online photo-sharing service. Together they illustrate the complexities of negotiating our responsibility to others when we are in the process of developing our own digital identities. This pattern offers a design solution for using social media in a thoughtful, literate and ethically responsible way.

One of the aims of this publication is to raise awareness and we hope you will distribute this material as widely as possible.”