One of the big stories in educational technology over the last few days has been the decision of Ning to cease providing free network sites. Many educationalists have been attracted to Ning by the ease of setting up and customising community sites and the use friendliness of the application.

Ning says the reason behind the decision is business: “Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.

So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service.”

OK, it is sad and traumatic for those who have invested heavily in building communities based on Ning and cannot afford to apy for the premium service. But is it surprising?

We have all become used to using free social software services. But, at the end of the day we live in a capitalist society. Yes, the software industry is evolving new business models. But are they in the long term sustainable. Ning, like many other services such as PBwiki, has based its economic model on providing a free ‘basic’ service and an enhanced premium service. Providing free services for education could be seen as having two benefits. the first is in publicising and popularising a particular service in the hope it will then attract sufficient premium business customers to justify the cost of the free service. The second is to hope that sufficient education customers will see the benefit of upgrading to the free service. I suspect there are three problems with this. The first is that in the present economic climate educational institutions and projects are looking to reduce expenditure on technology. The second is the increasing availability of competing services, making it difficult for any one company to dominate a market (unless the name is Google). And then there is the long tail – as the Ning press statements suggest, many of these network sites drive very little traffic. I myself have 43 PBwiki sites – many of them created for a short period of interaction with a limited number of colleagues.

The main model to support free services is advertising. Advertising is what drives Facebook’s relentless, aggressive and often unpopular innovations in their site design and functionality (and associated reduction in rights to privacy). I am not an economist but cannot understand how this market can continue to expand indefinitely. Surely there is a finite limit to the amount fo advertising the web market can absorb. Of course, it can continue to expand rapidly as long as web traffic continues to grow at a fast rate, but one day it must and will tail off. And as more players enter the market and attempt to challenge Google’s domination (Google is above all, an advertising company) the cost of advertising and therefore the returns will fall. Apple are set to enter the mobile advertising market with the release of version 4 of the iPhone software. Will companies invest yet more in advertising or will Apple’s share of the market be at the expense of someone else. In the long run this cannot be a sustainable business model.

Of course there are other ways of sustaining development. I am particularly impressed with Forio, an online application for creating simulations. Forio is free to use and the company encourages users to share their code under a Creative Commons license. The business appears to be supported by offering a service creating simulations for those without the time of ability and by providing training in how to use their application.

For education this raises issues – besides the long running issue of whether it is appropriate to provide educational sites carrying prominent advertising. Is it wise to rely on services which can be withdrawn at any time. Of course it is possible to undertake a risk assessment and I guess many large institutions do this. But for many of us working in teh long tail of education, even this may be beyond our knowledge and resources.

A major issue for me, and one which influenced me against using Ning, is that there was no obvious way of extracting my data from the site. It is good to see that Ning have said they will work to help users extract their data if they choose not to upgrade to the premium service. But surely this service should have been provided all along.

Somewhere in all this there is some kind of ethical issue. Readers with long memories may remember my posts protesting at Elgg’s proposed closure of the Eduspaces blog site, something over two years ago. I do not feel so bitter about Ning;s decision. Elgg was part of our community, Ning has never pretended to be anything other than a commercial service. And yet, in offering a free service for education and for the community, should nt there be some element fo ethical responsibility. Should companies offer a service they are unlikely to be able to sustain. And can we afford to be reliant on business’s from outside our community, with no ethical attachment to our aims and purposes?

It is also good to see the discussion within the community on different options to Ning – see for example Seven Sexiest Alternatives to Ning. Many of these are smaller companies, offering much the same service as Ning has in the past and hoping to casg in on Ning’s withdrawal of free services. It is particularly heartening to see that Buddypress rates highly in many of the discussions (as also does Elgg). Buddypress, a social networking plug in for WordPress MultiUser is Open Source Software. Buddypress is not a hosted service, although there are some companies now offering hosted sites. This means it is not free. It requires a server to run it on and expertise and knowledge in configuring and maintaining the application. But firstly the data is your own and you can archive and export the data. Secondly you are free to extend or modify your site in any way you wish. And thirdly the costs incurred tend to go into local and community employment – to provide more technicians in educational establishments or to support local software administrators – many of them working in small or medium enterprises – rather than to large international companies, even if these costs are hidden through advertising or premium services.

This, in turn, builds the pool of skill and competences in our communities, be it educational or the wider geographically based community. And research suggest that small and community based enterprises are the major driving fore for innovation, rather than the large companies that dominate so much of our economies.

(Picture from informationisbeautiful.net). I was lucky enough to get away from a meeting in Vienna last week by train to north Germany. many of my colleages were not so lucky and faced a long journey by train and ferry to return to the UK.

There are a number of serious issues raised by the European flight restriction, especially for those of us who work on multi national European projects. typically, these projects involve three or four full partnership meetings a year. Indeed, one way of viewing European projects, especially with the often strange funding rules, is the the EU is providing a large and hidden subsidy to the aviation industry!

Face to face meetings are important for developing and sharing mutual ideas, meanings and trust. And of course there is the oft quoted maxim that the  real work gets done on the social time. Whilst I would probably agree, this raises a further issue. If our face to face time is so important – and so expensive in terms of the carbon we generate, do we fully take advantage of this privileged opportunity? To my mind too much time is wasted with business that could easily be conducted on-line. And too little time is spent designing our own face to face learning environments. Conversely, we are failing to seriously develop ideas of how to effectively use video and online modes of communication.

If the Icelandic volcano forces us to think about these issues, it will have been a very valuable learning exercise. I also wonder if we should be forced to consider and report on the cost of all meetings in terms of their carbon footprint. We have to justify them now in purely monetary terms, who not also in terms of their environmental impact?  Pontydysgu has a rule of thumb for travel that if a journey can be undertaken by train in six hours or less, then we do not pay for flight tickets. The European Commission could easily introduce a similar rule.

Coming from Pontypridd in South Wales. the reported salary expectations of Conservative Party supporting students comes as something of a shock.

The Guardian newspaper reports that “one in five Tory-voting students expects to command more than £100,000 by the age of 30, compared to just one in ten student Labour supporters. Conservative backers also have the most optimistic starting salary expectations, expecting an average of £22,900 in their first job.”

I have never earned 10000 pounds a year, and do not think I know anyone who has. Clearly class is still the most important factor in determining earnings potential and in likely voting patterns by students.

The Giardian goes on to say “Labour voters were less assured of their earning potential, predicting an average salary of £20,900.”

And, surprise, surprise: “Tory voters were also more likely to attend fee-paying schools. They expect to work in investment banking and management consulting jobs more so than their left-leaning counterparts.”

It is depressing to see that those working in the least useful jobs, in employment areas which have brought the world economy to its knees, remain those aasosicted with sucessful, well remunerated careers.

A quick report from the European Commission funded Mature project. I am in Vienna this week at a meeting of the project consortium. The project is researching how knowledge matures in organisations and aims to develop and test software tools to support both individual knowledge development and organisational learning.

One of the activities undertaken over the last year was a ‘representative study’ based on interviewing individuals from 125 companies in Europe and look at how knowledge was developed and shared in their enterprise. The results of the survey will be published in the near future on the project web site.

One of the most interesting findings is what processes people perceived as important for knowledge maturing within their organisation and how ell they though these processes were important. The two processes perceived as most important were ‘reflection’ and ‘building relationships’ between people. These were also the two processes seen as amongst the least supported.

This could be seen as offering a strong steer for the development of new software tools. mature is already testing the prototype of a ‘people funding’ tool, designed to make more transparent the skills, competences and interests of employees in an organisation. The issue of ‘reflection’ is more complex. e-Portfolio researchers have always emphasised the centrality of reflection to learning, yet it is hard to see concrete examples of how this can be supported. Your comments on this would be most welcome.

This is a bit of fun. Paper.li allows you to view Twitter streams as a daily newspaper. How does it do this? It takes your tweets and the tweets of those you follow, analyses them and organises them as sections of a newspaper. The newspaper is updated daily and you can subscribe to receive notification of new editions by email.

And although I was initially cynical, I rather like it. You can view my daily twitter paper at http://paper.li/GrahamAttwell

It is not often that I quote the Strathclyde Telegraph. But Jo has pointed out to me this interesting article about how young people in the Uk are pressurised into going to univeristy when it may not be the bext option for them.

The article quotes research conducted by Notgoingtouni.co.uk which “has found that nearly 40% of school leavers feel pressured into attending university by teachers, and 28% said that their parents expected them to take the academic route while a further 20% felt that university was the only career option being made available to them.”

It goes on to cite the Edge foundation who report “1 in 4 students are dropping out of university, with bad advice from careers services being held as one of the reasons: “It is clear that many people are not being advised on the best option for them and their future”.

A Yougov poll has also found that 65% of teachers feel that there is no clear progression for vocational qualifications, unlike the 85% who feel that there is such development for academic ones.

Sarah Clover, of Notgoingtouni.co.uk commented on the findings:

“Despite the name we are in no way against university but sadly experience has shown that many careers advisors are ill equipped to provide guidance on vocational opportunities, leaving young people feeling that university is the only option available to them… careers advisors must be made to learn about the options outside of the traditional university route.”

This research shows the need for both an improvement in careers advice in the UK to include options other than univeristy but also the necessity to raise the prestige of apprenticeships. Ironically labour market data suggests that apprentices find it far easier to find employment than graduates. However the long term pay prospects for graduates remains better than that of apprentices. More flexible work based learning provision could allow progression routes from apprenticeship to higher qualifications. Alternatively, an extension of apprenticeship for graduates could both allow the development of work based skills and knowledge and develop more parity between the different routes.

Over the next three months I will be blogging about our experiences in organising the PLE2010 conference.

First the background. Last September during a pleasant conference stay in Crete a group of us decided, somewhat audaciously, to organise a conference on Personal Learning Environments, PLE2010. We duly formed a small organising committee, of which I am a member, and invited leading researchers and practitioners to join an academic committee.

We spent a long time designing a detailed call for contributions, aided by the template for guidelines for authors from AltC which they had helpfully licensed under Creative Commons.

Whilst we wished to encourage academic contributions in the form of ‘proceedings papers’ and ‘short papers’ we wished to develop the conference as a community learning space and to facilitate communication and exchange of ideas. This, we felt, could be through encouraging more innovative forms of contributions to the conference through for instance the use of unconferencing spaces, Bring Your Own Laptop sessions, posters, Pecha Kucha, debates and so on.

The original deadline for contributions was March 24, which we later extended to April 7th. We ended up with 82 submission – far is excess of what we had expected. However, despite us stressing our willingness for innovative formats, 41 of these are for proceedings paper and 19 for short papers. We were happy that we had 8 submissions for workshops, although with only 2 submissions, the response to the call for papers was disappointing.

Wht to make of this? I do not think it is because researchers in the PLE community are wedded to traditional conference formats, but more likely because they are expected to deliver an academic paper in order to get funding from their institution or project to attcnd the conference.

We discussed these issues at a meeting of the project organising committee today. Clearly, we have to wait for the result of the reviewing process before we will know how many papers are finally accepted. But it is likely that if we schedule all the proceedings papers in the normal way – with 20 minutes for a presentation and 8 minutes for discussion – we will have to run a large number of parallel sessions, thus resulting potentially in a small audience for many presentations. A useful proposal today is that we write to those authors whose proposals are successful, offering them a variety of potential presentation formats (including a traditional paper session). That then leaves us a challenge – which I am passing on to blog readers. What kind of formats could be best to develop discussion round papers produced for a conference. can we think of more innovative approaches than the traditional 20 minute slide and tell session? How can we use technology before the conference to encourage an exchange around ideas? Please add nay ideas you had in the comments below.

I will keep you posted on what is decided.

We were delig

I wrote a blog post earlier this week abut how much of our present training system is based on a deficit model – of looking at what skills and knowledge we think workers in particular occupation should have, at measuring what skills and knowledge they do have and then providing training to match the gap. I suggested this was an inefficient and reductionist approach, instead suggesting we should build from the skills an knowledge people have now to that which they could have with support for learning.

Today a call for tender dropped into my email box from the European Centre for  Vocational Education and Training (CEDEFOP). The tender is for data collection for skills obsolescence for older workers. And to my mind it illustrates just what we should not be doing. The tender says:

“Parallel and in close connection to its skill demand and skill supply activities, Cedefop is also analysing skill mismatch at various levels. To guide such analysis, five priorities for research have been identified. These priorities are: 1) improve measurement of skills and skill mismatch; 2) examine the persistence of skill mismatch and its impacts; 3) improve understanding of skill mismatch processes, its dynamics and the consequences of skill mismatch; 4) focus on skill mismatch for vulnerable groups on the labour market; and 5) improve data availability and use. The work carried out in the context of this tender and subsequent analysis by Cedefop aims to address aspects present in all research priorities simultaneously.

Attention among policy makers for skill obsolescence as an explanation for mismatch has increased significantly as a result of increasing changes in work and organisations. Cedefop (2009) concluded that from a lifelong learning policy perspective, the question of how and how fast skills become obsolete is crucial. However, this preoccupation has not been endorsed by current research, with most empirical studies dating back to the 1970’s and early 1980’s. Current research on skills obsolescence tends to focus on its impact on wages. Apart from some insights dating back to classical studies among engineers (for an overview, see Cedefop, 2009 and De Grip et al, 2002), little is known about how fast different types of skills become obsolete, how skill obsolescence interacts with training and skill development and how skills obsolescence processes work.”

The idea of matching the skills of individuals and the skills needed in an economy is a futile dream. Skills needs and usage are dynamic and constantly changing. Even more critical is that such approaches ignore the potential of skilled workers to shape production and work processes – and thus to develop innovation. The skills matching approach assumes a pseudo semi scientific, econometric formula for measuring skills. But lets look at the wording again. Much depends on how we interpret skills and I suspect this tender is very much based on a narrow Anglo Saxon understanding of skills and competences. But it is not the skills of the worker (or the worker themselves) who become obsolescent. rather it is that changing work processes and changing forms of production require new skills and knowledge – skills and knowledge that build on past learning. And older workers are often those with the experience to teach others – to be a Significantly Knowledgeable Other to use Vygotsky’s term.

A policy of innovation should be based on using to the full the skills and competences and workers and on developing workplaces to facilitate learning through meaningful work tasks – rather than using tools to measure how obsolescent older workers skills are.

Today is the last day for submissions to the Personal Learning Environments Conference being held in July in Barcelona. Here is my abstract for the conference, based on work Pontydysgu are developing through the EU funded Mature project. I will try to post a longer version in the next week or so.

Central to the idea of the Personal Learning Environment is it can assist learners in bringing together and reflecting on all their learning be it form formal education programmes, from work or from home. This would include both formal and informal learning.

According to Jay Cross, around 80 per cent of learning in work is informal. Yet much of the focus for work based learning is on courses, rather than practice. Apprenticeship systems usually combine learning in vocational schools with practice in the workplace but there are often problems in linking up theoretical school based learning with work based practice.

Researchers into organisational learning have focused on how workplaces can be designed to facilitate learning. Barry Nyhan (Nyhan et al, 2003) states “one of the keys to promoting learning organisations is to organise work in such a way that it is promotes human development. In other words it is about building workplace environments in which people are motivated to think for themselves so that through their everyday work experiences, they develop new competences and gain new understanding and insights.”

Yet without support for learning, organizational change may not be sufficient. Vygotsky (1978) has pointed to the importance of support from a More Knowledgable Other to support learning in a Zone of Proximal Development which which is the gap between the “actual developmental level” which a person can accomplish independently and the “potential developmental level” which person can accomplish when they are interacting with others who are more capable peers or adults.

The paper will report on work being undertaken through the EU IST programme to develop a Personal Learning & Maturing Environment (PLME), embedded into the working environment, enabling individuals to engage in maturing activities within the organisation and in wider communities of practice beyond organisational boundaries. The work centres on the design a ‘mini learning activities (Conole, 2008) utilising Technology Enhanced Learning to support learners in a Zone of Proximal Development. These activities will utilise multi media including infographics and Technology Enhanced Boundary Objects (Hoyles at al). Although the mediation of a MKO may be seen as being embodied within the technology, learners will also have access to support through an organisational people tagging service. The PLE applications will be available to learners both through desktop and mobile devices.

References

Barnes S.A., Bimrose J., Brown A., Hoyles C., de Hoyos M., Kent P., Magoulas G., Marris L., Noss R., Poulovassilis A. (undated) Workplace personalised learning environments for the development of employees’ technical communicative skills, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Conole G., Dyke M., Oliver M., Seale J (2004) Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design, Computers & Education, Volume 43, Issues 1-2, August-September 2004, Pages 17-33 21st Century Learning: Selected Contributions from the CAL 03 Conference

Nyhan, B. Cressey, P. Tomassini, M. Kelleher, M., Poell, R. (2003). Facing up to the learning organisation challenge. Vol. I. Thessaloniki, CEDEFOP

Vygotsky L.(1978) Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Many of you have ordered copies of the Taccle handbook which should have been delivered to you by now. The handbook was produced as part of the Taccle project. TACCLE or Teachers’ Aids on Creating Content for Learning Environments, is a project funded by the EU under its Lifelong Learning Programme. Its aim is to help teachers to develop state of the art content for e-learning in general and for learning environments in particular. It tries to achieve this by training teachers to create e-learning materials and raising their awareness of e-learning in general.  According to the project application “TACCLE will help to establish a culture of innovation in the schools in which they work.”

What exactly does TACCLE do?

• Train teachers to create content for electronic learning environments in the context of an e-learning course.
• Enable teachers to identify and decide which ICT tools and content are most useful for particular purposes.
• Teach teachers how to create learning objects taking into account information design, web standards, usability criteria and reusability (text, images, animations, audio, video). This will enable (inter)active and cooperative learning processes.
• Enhance the quality of e-learning environments in education by training teachers how to use them effectively and by creating resources to help them do so.

The Taccle course

In October this year we are organising a one week course in Belgium. The tutors will be Graham Attwell and Jenny Hughes. The course will focus on the use of Web 2.0 and social software for learning. It will be learner centred and hands on, developing and building on participants existing and future practice in this area. Although teh day to day programme will be negotiated with participants the EU requires us to provide an outline programme in advance. This programme may provide you with some flavour of what the course is about 🙂

Sunday, 17 October 2010

• Arrival, welcome, dinner

Monday, 18 October 2010

• Introduction to programme and working methods
• Design of personal and group workspace
• Introduction and design of online working spaces
• Online session with local schools—discussion on use of technology for learning in schools
• Group work: establishing base line of competence in group
• Group work: identification of group learning needs
• Market place and skills swap shop—sharing skills and knowledge in using technology for learning

Tuesday, 19 October 2010

• How to use social software in the classroom
• Identification of issues, application or problems in participants’ own practice
• Practical workshops to include Developing and using cartoons, Podcasting, Video and videocasting, Blogging, Microblogging, Web quests, Wikis and Digital Repositories
• Guided tour in Oostende
• Interactive online sessions with students from local schools to explore how they are using web 2.0 and social software in their own learning
• Developing and maintaining Digital identities—input, exploration of issues plus group work session
• Teaching online safety -Plenary session: identification of problems in participants practice + developing solutions of the problems identified
• Preparation + exhibition of posters based on personal experience

Thursday, 21 October 2010

• Parallel sessions: using mobile devices in education, using games in education
• Using social software in practice

Friday, 22 October 2010

• Presentation of real learning experience for local experience students using either blended learning or online
• Change management, introducing new ideas
• Open forum with school managers and advisors

Saturday, 23 October 2010

• Day trip to Bruges
• Course evaluation

Sunday, 24 October 2010

• Departure

The course costs 1300 Euro (675 Euro for full board accomodation + 625 Euro for tuition and course materials). However for both participation fee and travel expenses to Belgium participants from Europe can request a grant from the Life Long Learnming programme National Agency in your country, which will cover all costs.
You can find the address of your national agency here. You can also find out more details about the course on the Socrates course database – address to follow shortly. The deadline for applications is 30 April.

Or you can get more information from Jens Vermeersch Tel.: +32 2 7909598 jens [dot] vermeersch [at] g-o [dot] be