I spent a lot of time yesterday evaluating ‘virtual classrooms’ or spaces for online simultaneous communication.

The background: over the last two years I have recognised, presented and participated in a considerable number of seminars, workshops and conferences using Elluminate. Whilst it has its bad days, in general Elluminate is reliable and I am fairly confident in getting people online and in facilitating communication on the platform. So when I was asked to help organise an online course for careers guidance professionals, I based it around a mix of self directed activities using PBWorks and simultaneous online sessions in Elluminate.

Then came the problem. Elluminate is a Java based application and requires both Java to be installed and the opening of a couple of ports which are sometime closed by systems administrators. Indeed the ports had been closed but that obstacle could be overcome. But, for one reason or another (I am not quite sure what), the application could not be got to run on Windows XP machines on the clients network. So I was left looking for an alternative.

First on the list was Net Webinar. I was not much taken by this given the web page marketing hype (and the price) but we had been recommended to use it by our client. It is Applet based avoiding the need for Java or downloads and I could set up a free month’s trial. The application seemed very much to emphasise the role of the presenter. There was no shared whiteboard and the main role of participants seemed to be to ask text questions. Sadly last night the person I was collaborating with was unable to access the webinar I set up (I suspect an issue with Windows 7 netbook version). Today I tried again with another colleague and it all worked quite well but I couldn’t hear any audio from her. The manual is also curious, seeming to focus more on toll paid telephony than anything else!

Next we looked again at Flash meeting. Although I use it regularly for project meetings I had never tried it with the whiteboard and tools enabled. For interactivity, this requires each user to have their own account. Furthermore the design does not really work, neither are the presentation tools far developed. Flash meeting is as the name suggests a meeting tool, I think.

On to DimDIm. I like the design, although functionality is limited by only five microphones being available. And the big failing of many of these system seems to be that the Flash system they use is unreliable. When switching between modes – whiteboard, presentation etc. it seemed to do things to my audio. And this morning, trying it amongst three of us, one person could hear everyone, whilst two of us could not hear each other. Promising but two buggy to risk with a non techie audience.

At this point I tried a skype shout out. The first reply was from Nergiz Kern. “NergizK @GrahamAttwell @cristinacost Maybe a bit unconventional but what about http://www.scribblar.com/ ? (If all else fails).” I liked the approach , unconventional or not. But once more the audio failed miserably. On skype someone (by now I have forgotten who) recommended WizIQ. oh dear, the moment I tried to invite Cristina Costa (who by now I had inveigled as a fellow tester), the whole site went crazy on me. Things were moving all over the place. More Flash problems I suspect. Another one ruled out.

I tried another two systems this morning. Similar results. With he notable exception of Flash meeting, the implementation of Flash in these systems seems very buggy. It might work on a good day for most people. Or it might not. And even in Flash meeting we spend a lot of time saying “can you hear me.”

I didn’t try Adobe Connect. I cannot afford it. And the trial version is too limited to use for the sessions I am trying to organise. It should also be remembered that Elluminate is not free – it is just that I am lucky to have access to an install.

So my conclusion – Flash doesn’t really work. And none of the free systems are yet good enough for working with non technical first time users. Disappointing really. My latest thinking is to re-jig the session and use an embedded slidecast, along with an embedded chat room in PBWorks. It is all free and with a bit of luck and a following wind it might work. Or perhaps to use Edmodo.

I’d be very interested to hear of your experiences of using these, or any other online seminar or workshop tools.

I was greatly inspired by the Wise Kids conference on Young People in a Digital World – Preparing, Inspiring and Supporting, held in Bangor in Wales on Wednesday. This was the second of two regional conferences, with videos from the first, in Swansea earlier in the week are available now online (the video by Tanya Byron, who advices the UK government on internet safety is encouraging from a policy point of view).

Here are a few impressionistic comments which by no means express the breadth and quality of the event.

Two things which particularly encouraged me. The first was the breadth of organisations represented by participants. This included teachers, local government officers, youth workers, researchers and delegates from internet and software companies and the  voluntary sector. The second was the active involvement of young people themselves in the conference.

And for me, the highlight was the youth panel of some ten or so students from Ysgol Trfyan. They were thoughtful, articulate and above all opinionated. Having previously presented a Welsh language drama about e-safety, they went on to answer questions from participants in the conference. all but one said that if they were forced to choose they would give up television rather than the internet. But there main message was their opposition to the ban on accessing social networking sites and particular Facebook from school. They said the reason they had been told for the ban was that social networks had been used for cheating in exams (unlikely as I found this, a report in last weeks Guardian claims the use of mobile phones for cheating is on the increase!). However they could not see why Facebook has been banned when there was still access to other sites including games. “Facebook is better for learning than games”, said one. Another said: “Whatever they ban we will find a way around it:. And although there may have been an element of campaigning going on, when asked what site they accessed first when they went on the internet, nine said Facebook, one YouTube, and one shopping.

Members of the panel has obviously researched the question of e-safety in some depth in preparation for their drama performance. However, whilst they felt schools should do more to teach internet safety and that also parents should pay more attention to what their children were doing on the internet, they were against nanny programmes. They were also dubious that present age restrictions of access to sites like Facebook were working. One member of the panel said that if her younger sister insisted she was going to set up a Facebook account,, despite being under 13, at the end of the day it was pointless to try to stop her but instead she would try to watch out for her sister’s safety!

The issue of safety tended to overwhelm the conference. As chair Alan Davies said, we seemed to be doing a lot of preparing, and supporting, but not so much inspiring.

Especially in the workshop sessions there was a lot of inspiring. I enjoyed the presentation by Rebecca Newton on Moshi Monsters. But my favourites were the workshop sessions by John Davitt – Occupy the Hand and Mind – simple strategies to make learners active with New Tools – and Leon Cynch‘s brave exploration of the suddenly unfashionable Second Life.

However these sessions were very much geared towards teachers and trainers. There is a big gap – a gap between what such pioneers as John and Leon are doing and the reality of what our systems administrators and school managers are allowing. And it is that gap which was so eloquently exposed by the students from Ysgol Trfyan. The issue of firewalls, white lists and so on is not an administrative issue. If education is to keep in touch with the way young people (and older people too) are exploring and using the internet for learning, for work and for play, then we have to rethink the present absurd policy of banning social software.

Yes, online safety is an issue. But Wise Kids has shown that internet safety is computable with open systems and that educating young people is a better policy than policing them.

Much of our work in Pontydysgu involves trying to support the learning and knowledge development needs of others – individuals and organisations. So it was interesting when I was asked what were our learning needs. This is what I wrote:

Pontydysgu is an SME, based in Wales, UK.
It employees one full time worker, one intern student and four part time workers. Pontydysgu is a research and development company, working in the field of information and technology communications for knowledge development and sharing and education and learning.
Staff are distributed, with three of the workers mainly based n Wales and three in Bremen, Germany. Although the organisation has two offices, in Pontypridd and Bremen, most staff work from home and are heavily reliant on computer based technologies for coordination and communication.
Most of the work of the organisation is project based, with projects varying in length between three months and four years. Clients include both the private and public sector, with a number of projects sponsored by the European Commission. The projects involve a considerable amount of traveling and at any one time, half of the staff may be away from the offices.
Pontydysgu is a knowledge based organisation and the work involves continuos learning in multiple disciplinary based fields. Excepting the Intern student all of the staff are qualified to degree level.
Learning is informal and on-the-job and may take as high as 33 per cent of work time. This process is not unproblematic. There are issues as to how to coordinate learning, how to support what is essentially peer based learning and how to develop a shared organisational knowledge base. Whilst staff are highly motivated in self learning, there is an issue as to how best to balance individual learning interests with organisational learning needs.
Formal courses are generally seen as too inflexible to meet learning needs. Accreditation is not required by the company, but the development and use of a portfolio would allow individual learning to become more transparent than it is at present and allow for potential transfer in future employment.
The organisation has invested in mobile devices and all employees have an iPod touch. However the use of such devices is largely  up to individual staff. The organisation is presently looking at the use of advanced smartphones to improve communication and learning.

Interesting results from the latest Pew Internet survey on adults use of social networking sites in the United States (I wish we had a European equivalent). The survey found:

Of adult SNS users:

• 73% have a Facebook account
• 48% have a MySpace profile
• 14% have an account on LinkedIn
• 1% each on Yahoo, YouTube, Tagged, Flickr and Classmates.com

Overall there is nothing particularly surprising in the results. The survey shows just how hegemonic Facebook has become in terms of social networking sites. I am a little surprised at how low the figures are for Flickr and YouTube. However this may be because you do not need an account unless you wish to upload material to these services. I guess it confirms the fact that only a relatively low percentage of social software and social network users are creating content.

It is also interesting to note the increasing numbers with a LinkedIn account. In the longer term I think LinkedIn may prove more sustainable than Facebook, if only because it has a real purpose behind it. And LinkedIn seem to have successfully increased the social networking functionality, whilst not allowing it to overwhelm the site.

A quick blogsquat from Jenny Hughes….

I have been fascinated by the Yellow Arrow project and my mind is working overtime thinking of of ways it could be extended from art to education.

For those of you who have not come across it yet, the Yellow Arrow project is a global public art project that started in New York and is now an underground movement that has spread to over 450 cities in 35 countries.

Basically, you download a yellow arrow sticker from the project website and stick it somewhere public. If someone sees the sticker, they can text the code number on it to a particular telephone number and will immediately receive a text back with a message left by the person who put the sticker there.

So the yellow arrow basically means ‘there’s more here: a hidden detail, a funny story, a memory or a crazy experience.’ Each arrow links digital content to a specific location using the mobile phone.

If you want more info, just go to http://yellowarrow.net/v3/

The yellow arrow messages range from personal reflection to concrete information about, for example, the history of the building the arrow is stuck on. They sort of cross the divide between tourism and art.

Now I got interested in the idea during the Taccle training courses and tried out a variation on this using a commercial application, which was actually nothing to do with the Yellow Arrow project. (For details of this see, my previous post http://www.pontydysgu.org/2009/11/25-practical-ideas-for-using-mobile-phones-in-the-classroom/ ) I stumbled on the Yellow Arrow idea when I was browsing around for ideas on getting teachers to explore mobile technologies.

It seems to me that there are endless possibilities for developing ‘Yellow Arrow Learning. – The text messages could have an explicit learning content.

• The arrows could be coded by subject area or topic.
• Using a Google maps mash up you could design learning trails.
• The telephone number to ring could be linked to our own server. So, for example, we could add urls to You Tube or Flickr
• You could get whole communities involved – why not a local town (like Pontypridd) becoming a Yellow Arrow Learning Community?
• Get all the schools involved as well as local industry. So a yellow arrow stuck on the brickworks could lead to a video of bricks being made.
• Why not extend the public domain yellow arrows to the inside / private domain as well – yellow arrow work based learning?

The possibilities seem endless. The technology is simple. It might, in the future be upgraded to augmented reality applications or use QR instead of phone numbers – or both.

Graham and I are both interested in doing some work to progress some of these ideas and possibly putting in a funding application or working with someone else who wants to. It could be quite an edgy project if we can get a really creative team together. If any of you are interested and have some ideas, please get in touch.

More thoughts on competence – mostly in my attempts to develop an idea of how mobile devices could be used for learning in the workplace – and in particular for practice based and informal learning.

In my last post on this subject I pointed to definitions of competence from German research seeing the main aim of the development of competence is the ‘formation of personality structures with a view to coping with the requirements of change within the process of transformation and the further evolution of economic and social life.’

This definition is counter-posed to the more narrow and functionalist views of competence more common in the UK and USA research and education and training systems.

In this post I want to revisit earlier research work in Germany by Gerald Heidegger and Felix Rauner who looked at occupational profiles. Occupational profiles are in effect groups of competencies based on individual occupations. In Germany there are over 360 officially recognised occupations.

Heidegger and Rauner  were commissioned by the Government of Rhineland Westphalia to write a Gutachten (policy advice) on the future reform and modernisation of the German Dual System for apprenticeship training.

They recommended less and broader occupational profiles and, if my memory is right, the idea of wandering occupational profiles. By this term they were looking to map the boundaries between different occupations and to recognise where competences from one occupation overlapped with that of another. Such overlaps could form the basis for boundary crossing and for moving from one occupation to another.

Heidegger and Rauner’s work was grounded in an understanding of the interplay between education, work organisation and technology. They were particularly focused on the idea of work process knowledge –  applied and practice based knowledge in the workplace. This was once more predicated on an idea of competence in which the worker would make conscious choices of the best actions to undertake in any particular situation (rather than the approach to competences in the UK which assumes there is always a ‘right way’ to do something).

Per Erik Ellstroem from Sweden has put forward the idea of Developmental Competence – the capacity of the individual to acquire and demonstrate the capacity to act on a task  and the wider work environment in order to adapt, act and shape (design) it.

This is based on the pedagogic idea of sense making and meaning making through exploring, questioning and transcending traditional work structures and procedures. In a similar vein, Rauner has come up with the idea of holistic work tasks, based on the idea that a worker should understand the totality of the work process they are involved in. He has proposed collaboration between small companies to ensure broad based training for apprentices.

One of the major problems within the German apprenticeship training system (which accounts for over half of the age cohort leaving school each year) is lack of co-ordination between the school and company based parts of the training. However, a mobile based Personal Learning Environment could allow apprentices to control their own learning and sense making through linking up practical tasks in the workplace to the more theory based school learning.  Informal and work based learning could potentially be mapped against competences with such a system.

(References to follow)

A quick post about mobile devices and work based learning – which I know I have been going on about a lot lately.

So far most of the work on mobile learning at a practical level seems to me to fit into four categories:

• applications designed to provide information for students – about their courses, lecture times, venues, transport information, buildings etc.
• what might be called learning objects – small apps designed to support learning about a particular topic or issue – often using multi media
• apps or projects aiming to improve communication between learners or between learners and teachers
• information – revision guides etc. designing to promote mobile access to resources

There is nothing wrong about any of these and they all may be useful in pushing mobile learning forward. But I think they may fail to really extend forward ideas about tecahing and learning 0 they are all essentially repackaging existing elearning applications for mobile devices.

The big potential I see for mobile devices is in their affordances of being always on – or almost always on, in the fact that we already accept the idea of the frequent but sporadic use of the devices for all kinds of activities such as taking photos and messaging – as well as making telephone calls – and that they are portable.

in other words – taking learning support to areas it has not been taken to before. And prime amongst these is teh workplace. It is little coincidence that many of the main take-up areas for elearning are for those occupations which involve regular use of computers e.g in ICT occupations, in marketing and management etc. Ans one of the main issues in developing elearning for vocational or occupational learning is the contextual nature of such learning and the high cost of producing specific learnng materials for relatively low numbers of learners. Vocational students often wish for learning materials to be in their own language, thus exacerbating the problem of small numbers of users for specific occupations.

It is also interesting to note that despite many researchers pointing to the importance of reflection as a key pedagogic tool, there has been limited pedagogic and technical development to facilitate such an approach.

The use of mobile devices can overcome this. They can be used in specific contexts of location, tasks, experince, colleagues and allow ready means of reflection through the use of photographs, video, text and audio.

If linked up to a server based ‘portfolio’ this could form an essential part of a Personal Learning Environment. Furthermore the learning materials become the entire work environment, rather than custom built applications. And tools such as Google Goggles could easily be incorporated (although I have to say it seems more alphe than beta ot me – I havent managed to get it to recognise a single object so far!).

I am mush taken with a free Android Ap called Ontheroad. It doesn’t do much. It is designed its ays for you to share your adventures on the road You have to set up a free account on a web site. You can publish active trips (I am going to try to make one this week). You can add articles including your position by GPS, you can add text, multimedia, dates and choose which trip to publish it to though the telephone network or by SMS. You can browse existing articles and look at comments. You can add media including photos already on your gallery. Or you can record a video (audio support seems limited).

And it is all synced through a server. It would not take much to refocus this app to a Learning Journey, rather than a road trip. And it could be incredibly powerful in terms of work based learning.

So I do not see a great technical challenge. the bigger challenge is in developing a pedagogic approach which incorporates informal learning in the workplace and such a portfolio based on practice within formal approaches ot education and training.

If you are interested in working with me to develop these technologies and ideas please get in touch.

I am surprised that there has not been more discussion of the UK Open University’s decison to sign up to Google Education for cloud computing services.

On his blog Niall Sclater says:

“In our first foray into cloud computing, Google will be hosting for our students:

• email (gmail)
• contacts
• instant messaging and presence
• calendar
• document creation, storage and sharing
• websites”

Interestingly, The OU, the UK’s largest univeristy, will not at the moment be giving staff access ot the system, presumably becuase of concerns over security and confidentiality.

Niall explains the reasons for the decision :

“Growing numbers of institutions are now adopting cloud-based systems such as Google Apps for Education, particularly in the US. The arguments for hosting your own student email are becoming increasingly weak when it can be done externally for free, or at least much more cheaply. Google will provide a service level agreement with higher levels of availability than we could achieve ourselves. In addition there are other services included such as instant messaging that we don’t currently provide to students but could help them to connect more with each other.”

However the decision has interesting implications for pedgogic approaches. Niall says:

“These systems will increasingly start to compete with some of the features of learning management systems / virtual learning environments such as Moodle and Blackboard. They provide a higher level of individual control for students and potentially remove some of the administrative burden from the university. …

Another area for investigation is the use of Google Apps as an eportfolio system. Our initial research has shown that it would work for some of the key aspects of eportfolio provision such as the storage of documents under the control of the user, the exporting of these so they can be taken with them through life, and the creation of templates for the collection of structured data for a variety of purposes. We still need to work out how we can freeze or export eportfolio content where it is being for formal assessment.”

In a comment on the blog, Tim Hunt, also from the Open University, says:

“The VLE is the University’s space where it publishes its courses, and students come to study that material and perform some course-specific activities.

Google tools / ePortfolio / PLE / student’s own laptop are the student’s spaces for keeping and managing their learning.

In a traditional bricks a and mortar, chalk and talk setting, the VLE is the lecture room and labs; and Google tools are the student’s room in the hall of residence, or possibly their leaver-arch file.

I think it is clear that you need both types of space, and that they complement each other. However, there are some activities that could take place in either space.”

Manish Malik from Portsmouth University, which is already giving access to Google cloud services to all students, tries to distinguish between PLEs, VLEs, loosely coupled applications and what he calls a “CLE or Cloud Learning Environment”

” The cloud can be seen as one big autonomous system not owned by any educational institution. Let the Academics or Learners be the users, of some cloud based services, who all equally share the privelages like control, choice, sharing of content etc on these services. Then this is different from a PLE, a VLE and a PTE. For example Google Apps for universities is hosted on the cloud, not fully controlled by any educational institution and certainly not owned by one. The tools on it are to a great extent academic or learner controlled. Each “Google Site”, for example, can be owned by an academic or a Learner and both users be given the same rights/control by one another (depending on who creates first). Likewise Google Docs can be owned and shared between learners themselves or learners and academics under their own control.

This gives all parties the same rights on same set of tools. This clearly has potential to enable and facilitate both formal and informal learning for the learner. Both the academic and the learner are free to use the tools the way they wanted and share and collaborate with anyone they wanted.”

I think Malik is wrong is distinguishing between PLEs and CLEs (and to be honest, we really need just to advance our understandings of PLEs, rather than invent yet more acrobyms and terminology). If we go back to the blog entry which strated it all – Scott Wilson’s “The Future VLE?”, it was always clear that a PLE would include different third party services  (even though cloud computing was not a term invented then as far as I know).

However, there are a number of interesting issues raised by the move towards cloud services for students.

Firstly, the services provided by Google make it very easy for s student to develop their own PLE. One of the long running concerns about PLEs has been whether or not all students have the knowledge and skills with technology to develop their PLE. This may overcome such concerns. Furthermore, in a podcast interview with Niall I made three years ago, he expressed the concern that university computer services had a duty to provide support for all applications a university was using for tecahing and learning. If PLEs were to be introduced he argued, this would be impossible due to the very diversity of different platforms and applications. Presumably, the deal with Google overcomes that issue.

Of course it is all to easy to see Google as the new evil empire, taking over education. But unless the nature of the deal between universities totally ties down systems, it should be relatively easy to integrate third party services with the Google apps, at least for someone with reasonable digital skills. And although Niall Sclater refers to ePortoflios, I see little difference in the way this is developing to a PLE.

Of course, there are worries about trusting a PLE to third party commercial companies. But data is not locked down on Google in the way it is on platforms like Facebook. it should be relatively simple for a learner to keep copies of important work and data on their own computers (and indeed to update those copies when they change computers).

Interesting, from my present interests, it  should be relatively simple to integrate Google apps with the Android platform, this making mobile learning much cimpler (ignoring of course the problems with cross paltform use).

Of course the proof will be in the use. Will teachers start moving to Google apps rather than use the Open Univeristiy’s Moodle platform? Will learners develop their own PLEs? How will the Google apps integrate with univeristy services and applications. Will data be secure and will Google continue to support student PLEs even after they have left university: Is this just a new form of lockin? And how reliable are Google services? Do the moves by Portsmouth and the Open University herald a large scale shift by educational institutions to cloud services?

Most of all – will the use of these services provide new pedagogic affordances which will lead to changing practices in teaching and learning? Tims will tell.

I was idly wasting time reading my twitter stream and it occurred to me that I seem to be getting less tweets these days. So I twittered out “Is it my impression or do i get less tweets these days. Following more people so are they just tweeting less?: And in the wonderful way that twitter works back came a reply from @paulbrichardson: “I am getting fewer tweets too. But there is more substance to them – usually expressing or referencing an idea..” This was quickly followed up by “Worried that my last tweet points to an attempt at a taxonomy of tweets. I am definitely not going there though…” And of course @tmartinowen couldn’t resist the bait: “here is a totally unsubstantial tweet – just to keep the classification going – or does the parenthesis give it substance?”

Nor would I wish to risk a classification. But there do seem to be a few things going on in the way we are using twitter (or at least the people I follow). There are far less of the straight forward “good morning Twitterverse” or “had a great lunch” or “tired and going to bed now” type tweets. u suspect this was a leftover from the Facebook status update days (in the same way few people are bothering to update their skype status nowadays). Have we simply become bored with our own mundane lives?

And Paul is right – most of the tweets I receive do seem to be on points of substance and many point to a resource. This may be due to the increasing use of sophisticated Twitter clients and to cross application linking through the API (e.g posting Diego links to twitter). Twitter is becoming a rich repository of links to resources. However discovery remains problematic and harvesting is tricky due to lack of longevity.

This is all to the good. But I am increasingly missing the social nature of Twitter which also seems to be on the wane. We are using twitter for reporting and shouting out but does it still retain the social and collaborative nature of its early days? Of course there remain the odd maverick – @johnpopham’s #uktrains series is strangely compulsive.

A further trend is to increase the ability of machines to read twitter through hash tag taxonomies. As reported in the ReadWriteWeb a group of hackers ” in collaboration with Project EPIC, developed a new syntax to make it easier for computers to read tweets from areas that are affected by a disaster. If adopted widely, this new hashtag-based syntax will make it easier to automatically extract data about locations or the status of a road or person.”

But as comments on the blog pointed out such taxonomies are far from people friendly. is there a trade off between machine readable functionality and human and social uses of media?

Twitter is an interesting platform because of the wide affordances in its social use. The changing ways in which we are using Twitter may point to the evolution of the use of wider social media in the future.

Anyway – time to send a tweet announcing this post 🙂

Here is a bit of fun. I have been invited as an ‘expert’ “to participate as an expert in a vision-building process on the future of learning aimed at assisting European policy-makers in addressing the challenges that lie ahead. This is a great opportunity for you to have an impact on European policy making and actively shaping the Future of Learning.”

The invitation continues: “Before giving you instructions on what we are asking you to do, we would like to briefly introduce the context and methodology of the study.

The context of this study
The European Commission has recently launched a foresight study on “The Future of Learning: New ways to learn new skills for future jobs”. This study intends to develop visions and scenarios on the ways in which new skills and competences will be learned in Europe in 2020-2030. The study addresses the following dimensions:
(1) Emergent skills and competences associated with future jobs
(2) New ways and practices of acquiring knowledge, skills and competences
(3) Associated changes in the roles of the participants in the learning process, i.e. learners and teachers
(4) Implications for existing Education and Training institutions, systems and policy frameworks
(5) The role of information and communication technologies in transforming and supporting creative and innovative learning
(6) Changes and challenges to assessment, certification and accreditation
(7) Implications of the envisaged changes for present policy action and support

The project team is made up of researchers from the European Commission Institute for Prospective Technology Studies (IPTS) in Seville; TNO, the applied research and technology organisation of the Netherlands; the Open University of the Netherlands; and AtticMedia, a specialist learning communications agency from London. This team will, over the next 12 months, develop a number of visions and scenarios on the future of learning and review their implications for policy making.

Your contribution to the study
As a first step in this project we would like to invite you as an expert to contribute to a vision building process using the group concept mapping method (GCM). As communicated in the invitation, you will be involved online (using e-mail) in two stages of the methodology, namely (a) individual brainstorming of ideas and (b) individual sorting and rating of ideas. In the brainstorming phase you will be asked to generate ideas about specific aspects of education of the future. This phase will typically take between 10 and 15 minutes. A week later, you will receive an aggregated list of ideas generated by all experts involved to, first, sort the statements in groups of similarity and then rate them on some scales (e.g. importance and feasibility). If you would like to know more about the GCM methodology, a short description with examples from various projects is attached to this e-mail (Concept System Introduction). Those of you familiar with the classical concept mapping approach, will probably notice substantial differences with the GCM methodology.

Please read the following instruction for the brainstorming phase of the study carefully.

Instruction to the first phase of the study
We all have the feeling that education in 20 years will have to be different from education today. Education then will possibly deal with a new set of skills and competences, new curriculums or types of curriculums, innovative ways of learning and assessment, different roles for teachers and educational institutions, different impacts of technology, just to mention a few.

1.       We ask you to generate statements about your thoughts about education in 20 years, and to do this using the following format:

One specific change of Education in 20 years will be that:”

I am not sure about my qualifications as an expert in this study, nor indeed that experts are the answers to such a study.

Anyway my somewhat esoteric list is posted below. But what do you think. Post your ideas in a reply – who knows, we might do better than the “experts”, and if enough reply I will find a way to move to stage 2 which involves the sorting and rating  of proposed changes

My ideas

• We will recognise people for what they do rather than what qualifications they have
• Open learning through the internet will become common
• Learners will be expected to take control of their own learning
• Formal learning  will become more episodic with people entering and leaving education at various points in their career path
• Digital identities (and portfolios) will replace traditional CVs
• Management of digital identities will become a crucial competence
• The workplace will become a major context for learning
• Mobile internet enabled devices will become the major tool for learning
• Practice will become a focus for learning and will be captured through mobile devices and integrated with cloud based portfolios
• Augmented reality applications will be a major tool for learning
• Schooling will become a less important focus for learning as learning moves into the workplace, community and home
• Higher education will return to its traditional core purpose of research
• Vocational education and training become the major organisational form of learning
• Systems and services will be developed to allow mutual peer group learning between groups of interested learners
• Text books will be replaced by electronic multi media publications
• Blogs and other internet based multi media will be recognised as legitimate publications for researchers
• Multi User Virtual Environments will render physical attendance in school and university unnecessary
• The financial crisis will lead to the increasing privatisation of universities
• High course fees will deter many working class students from attending higher education
• Open Educational Resources will become widely adopted
• Virtual mobility will break down barriers between national education systems
• There will be a lowering of the school leaving age as it is recognised that other contexts for learning may be more effective and more motivating than school
• We will cease to rely on experts as the source of knowledge and curriculum and move towards quality based on use and endorsement through internet systems
• Context specific learning materials and tasks will lead to more localised learning
• Personal Learning Environments will replace institutional Virtual Learning environments
• Occupational profiles will become broader incorporating elements of what are now seen as individual occupations
• It will become common for people to move between occupations with learning key to supporting such moves
• Traditional disciplinary boundaries will break down with learners pursuing individual learning programmes based on multi and inter disciplinary learning
• Educational institutions will be reinvented as community knowledge centres serving both geographical communities and wider dispersed communities
• Inter sector and inter subject networks of institutions will combine to form networks based on purpose and interest