Another great edition of Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE from Loughborough. This show was broadcast from the Jisc Users and Innovations programme Next Generation Technologies in Practice Conference.

The show was presented by Graham Attwell and Josie Fraser.

It features George Roberts talking about the development of the JISC Emerge community, about building sustainable communities of practice in general and about Open Space technologies.

George is followed by Mark Van Harmelen talking with Graham Attwell about Personal Learning Environments. Mark reflects on the stage of development of PLEs and whether or not it is possible to prescribe the use of an institutional PLE. He goes on to describe the so called Manchester PLE that he is developing with support from the Users and Innovation programme.

Nicola Whitton and Rosie Jones talk to Josie Fraser about the potential of Augmented Reality Games for enhanced learning based on their work for Jisc on the Argosi project.

And Bob Rotherham from the Sounds Good project talks about the use of audio and MP3 recordings for giving feedback to students on their work.

Many thanks to everyone who helped out with the programme, including Steven Warburton who hosted the chatroom, Joe Roso who acted as producer and Dirk Stieglitz for sorting out the technical set up.

Music is by the Drunk Souls from the On Verra Plus Tard album from the Craetive Commons supported Jamendo web site.

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Back to the blog after far too long travelling around England and Wales. Amongst a series of meetings, I have been at the fantastic #Thoughtfest09 workshop in Salford and at the Jisc Users and Innovations programme Next Technologies in Practice Conference in Loughborough. there were so many ideas and so many great people I met I really do not know where to start.

#Thoughfest09 was particularly good in that we got to do and try things. Doing things included sessions on podcasting and mixing music, on producing digital cartoons and playing the wonderful Argosi game (my group came last 🙂 ). And great project demos including the Jisc Users and Innovations funded Awesome and (as it is now called) the Manchester PLE project. The other factor was size. The venue limited us to 30 or so participants and that allowed everyone to actively contribute to the workshop.

The Next Technologies in Practice Conference had perhaps less interactivity but once more featured an array of excellent projects. The Users and Innovations programme projects are now coming to maturity and the focus on user centred development can be seen in the imagination and creativity of the projects.

A number of common themes are emerging. Firstly, we are now seeing the emergence of mature and lightweight user centred Web 2.0 and social software applications for learning.  These applications break the mode of traditional approaches to e-learning. In short they are disruptive. This Wordle based on tweets from from the second day of the Jisc conference provides a pretty accurate illustration of the issues.

And whilst the edupunk approach remains attractive for small scale implementation and trialling, there is an increasing discussion on approaches to institutional innovation and change.

Gwen van der Velden, Director of Learning and Teaching Enhancement at the University of Bath in a presentation entitled “Engaging the sector: An institutional perspective on raising awareness to embedding new and emerging technologies” provided an overview of many of the issues to do with institutional change. Institutions, she said, are “devolved, centralised, bicameral, hierarchical, collegiate, managerial, entrepreneurial, bureaucratic, research intensive, teaching minded, ‘customer focused.'”

Popular pitfalls in project development were

• We need to train staff before they use it
• It doesn’t talk to the student data system/ staff data system/ etc
• Depending on middle managers
• Resource hungry development
• Nefarious proposals
• Solving non-existent problems

The issue of staff training raised considerable discussion on Twitter. If true, it probably condemns most e-Portfolio applications to the dustbin!

Gwen posed the following questions for project developers

• What is your strap line?
• Why would I support you?
• What problem do you solve for me?
• What evidence do you have to show me that your solution works?

Whilst this list might be seen as coming from an intsitional management perspective, it is not bad as a rubric for rapid and innovative project development.

Probably the biggest hit of the two events was the presentation by Carlos Santos and Luis Pedro from the University of Aveiro in Portugal. As Josie Fraser reported they “are moving away from the managed learning system model and providing a supported Personal Learning Environment (PLE) service linking in University functionality with member selected and supported web 2.0 distributed activity.” As Josie says “Why is this amazing? The global edtech community have been talking about how institutions can engage with learner-centered PLEs for a while now, but Aveiro and the SAPO team are putting it into practice. Campus wide. In September.”

This will definitely be one to watch. But right across education things are getting interesting as innovation and social software allied to new approaches to learning challenges the old ways of doing things,

I get more angry everyday over the UK government’s total mishandling of the economic crisis and its associated social impact. This is the latest ridiculous announcement as reported in the Guardian newspaper.

“High-fliers who lose their jobs in the recession will be able to retrain as teachers in just six months …..And those who are particularly gifted could become headteachers within four years …..The initiative, which is part of Labour’s public service reforms, will from September halve the minimum time it takes to train as a qualified teacher in England from a year to six months.

Ministers hope it will attract credit crunch victims from the City and the country’s brightest university graduates, many of whom are now looking for jobs in the public sector.

At least 200 people will be fast-tracked into headteacher roles from next year. Some will qualify for “golden hellos” of £10,000 for choosing schools in deprived areas.”

I totally fail to see what skills and competences former high fliers in the banking and finance sector have that makes them so suited for being a teacher. And besides anything else, they would need an extra six monthes course in ethics if they were seriously to enter a classroom.

The March edition of Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar will be broadcast live tomorrow, Tuesday 10 March, at 18.00 UK time, 1900 Central European Time.

This is a Sounds Special – being broadcast live from the Jisc Next Generation Technologies in Practice conference in Loughbrough, UK. The programme will be co-presented by Graham Attwell and Josie Fraser and will feature live interviews with George Roberts on Open Space Technology, Mark van Harmelen on Personal Learning Environments, Nicola Whitton and Rosie Jones on the potential of Alternate Reality Games for enhancing teaching and Bob Rotheram on Supporting learning using audio feedback.

You can listen to Sounds of the Bazaar live by going to http://tinyurl.com/6df6ar in your browser. The url should open your MP3 player of choice. And if you would like to join in the fun, Steven Warburton will be in our chatroom at http://tinyurl.com/sounds08.

Just add your name – no password required

We hope you can join us tomorrow

I generally don’t like the endless chain emails of jokes that do the rounds. But this one did cause me to smile – and I thought it was worth sharing here. Warning – I have no idea if this is true but if so it is a little alarming!

“This is unbelievable, but true!

Can you imagine working for a company that has a little more than  600 employees and has the following employee statistics .

29 have been accused of spouse abuse

7 have been arrested for fraud

9 have been accused of writing bad cheque’s

17 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses

3 have done time for assault

71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit

14 have been arrested on drug-related charges

8 have been arrested for shoplifting

21 are currently defendants in lawsuits

84 have been arrested for drink driving in the last year

Which organisation is this ?

It’s the 635 members of the House of Commons, the same group that cranks out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us inline. “

It is a busy period for me and hence little time for posting. Off again tomorrow to Pontypridd, then to Manchester for ThoughtFest08, a quick trip to Swindon to see my parents and then to Warwick University and on to Loughborough for the Jisc Users and Innovations programme Benefits Realisation project.

I do have the odd hour off! Last Thursday was the UEFA cup game between Werder Bremen and Milan (in Milan) and I managed to get myself to Bremen for the game. Problem was having made it to Germany, I found the game was not being seen on German TV. Conspiracy theories for this range between anti Werder bias on part of German broadcasters, ridiculous prices being charged by Milan for media rights and a desire not to show referees bias outside Italy!

So what to do? Innovation was running high. There were French, Chinese and Romanian broadcasters covering the game wide. satellite dishes were being moved, news cards plugged into computers and receivers. sadly, the only venue that my friend Lars knew was showing the match was on the wrong side of the river, it was pouring with rain and the ferry had stopped for the night. So, in the end, we decided to take our computers ot my local pub, where there is access to an open network from a nearby student house. The landlord had already positioned himself next to a radio with locals gathered around it. Lars and me got busy on our MacBooks, surfing for open feeds. And there were a lot of feeds – both on open streams and on peer to peer networks. The problem was there were also a lot of people seeking to watch those feeds. We ended up with two jerky rebuffering feeds running some 25 seconds behind the radio commentary. But nevertheless, the computers became a central focus on attention, perched on a high bar table and angled so everyone could watch.

The result, as I am sure you will guess since i am blogging this, was 2-2, so Werder progressed on the away goals rule.

But seriously, how long can this farce of closed media rights go on. As bandwidth continues to improve, I guess by next year the feeds will be reasonably good. And with so many people in China, in Romania and all over the world prepapred to generously share their satellite streams, it is only a matter of time before the football authorities  and the broadcasters have to reconsider their strategies for trying to screw as much money as possible from ordinary football fans for trying to follow their teams. Lets campaign for Open Football!

I am ever more excited by the possibilities of ebook and emedia readers linked to open access publications. I think we are on the cusp of a big change in access to learning. Recently I produced a short consultancy report on the potential for a new journal. The major technical considerations in the publication of a journal, I said, was if it was to be open or closed and what media should the journal deploy? Below is an excerpt from the report.

Open or Closed Access

There has been much recent discussion about Open Access journals. Much of this stems from the Budapest Open Access Initiative launched by the  Open Society Institute (OSI)  to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet. The  Budapest Open Access Initiative is intended as a statement of principle, a statement of strategy, and a statement of commitment and has been signed by a growing number of individuals and organizations from around the world who represent researchers, universities, laboratories, libraries, foundations, journals, publishers, learned societies. Signatories include the University of Hamburg.

Open access journals are scholarly journals that are available to the reader “without financial or other barrier other than access to the internet itself.” Some are subsidized, and some require payment on behalf of the author. Subsidized journals are financed by an academic institution or a government information centre; those requiring payment are typically financed by money made available to researchers for the purpose from a public or private funding agency, as part of a research grant. There have also been several modifications of open access journals that have considerably different natures: hybrid open access journals and delayed open access journals.

Open access journals may be considered to be:

• Journals entirely open access
• Journals with research articles open access (hybrid open access journals)
• Journals with some research articles open access (hybrid open access journals)
• Journals with some articles open access and the other delayed access
• Journals with delayed open access (delayed open access journals)
• Journals permitting self-archiving of articles

It should be noted that many of the hybrid journals maintain both an open access or delayed access online version alongside a paid for print version.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/), maintained by the University of Malmo, and  which covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals and aims to cover all subjects and languages currently lists 3786 journals in the directory. 1330 journals are searchable at article level and at the time of writing 240714 articles are included in the DOAJ service. 258 of the journals are in the field of education and 50 in technology. A list of these education related journals is included in Appendix 2. it should be noted few, if any are in the filed of vocational education and training.

Th advantages of open access journals is obviously their accessibility. A number of extensive studies have shown that articles in open access journals are much more likely to be cited than those in closed access journals.

It has also been argued that open access journal will promote innovation, facilitate collaboration between researchers and that the results of research funded by public money should be published in the public domain. It is interesting to note that there appears no difference in status or scholarly reputation of journals between those with open and those with closed access.

Open Access on-line journals are particularly popular for allowing access to doctoral research. For example Educate (http://www.educatejournal.org/index.php?journal=educate) is published twice a year in June and December under the auspices of the Doctoral School at the Institute of Education, University of London. The journal aims to provide:

• opportunities for the dissemination of the work of current post-graduate researchers at any stage of their research, and recent doctoral graduates, on any aspect of education or related areas
• opportunities for the dissemination of “work in progress” to the academic community
• a resource for professionals involved in educational enquiry and research

Educate articles are peer reviewed by both an established academic and a current post-graduate researcher. Articles are further reviewed by the editorial board as a whole.

The obvious argument against is financial. Doubts have been raised over the viability of the journal publishers if Open Access becomes the norm (although these questions are also raised by the move to online journals). There is a further issue that payments by researchers for publishing will disadvantage those without access to substantial research grants.

Media – print, online or both and what about publishers?

There is a growing trend towards on-line journals. Indeed, all journals today would appear to have some form of web presence.

However there is a basic divide between those journals which are only available online and those which are also available through a print edition. For those which also maintain a print edition, varying levels of access may be provided to the online content as noted above. It should also be noted that those journals with restricted public access to online content, may often allow that access if the researchers institution has a subscription to the journal. This is under the so called Athens Access Management System. There is also a growing number of online journals that require a subscription for access to full articles.

Many of the major journal publishers – for instance Blackwells – are currently launching enhanced on-line platforms. Additional a number of university libraries are exploring providing only online access to journals. This is likely to be accelerated by the move to digitalise texts and by developments in mobile devices and book readers able to access the internet.

There are obviously advantages for on-line publications in terms of accessibility.

If a publication is only available through the internet there are major advantages in terms of cost. Put quite simply, it is possible to by-pass publishers who represent a considerable hurdle in launching any new journal. Publishers want to be sure there will be a financially viable market for a journal and in a relatively small research area such as VET are understandably cautious. Furthermore, the long lead in time in negotiating with publishers can dissipate effort and lessen initial enthusiasm. In addition there is access to relatively powerful Open Source journal software such as Open Journal Systems (http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs) which claims to be running 1400 journals in ten languages in March 2008. There is some evidence to suggest it may be possible to shorten submission to publication turn around times using online journals.

So what are the disadvantages? Put quite simply, it  is one of prestige. Articles published by renowned academic journals have been seen as having higher prestige than those that are published online. This is not just a matter of prejudice. Many countries, including the Netherlands and UK, have a rating system for journals. And be it online or print, those backed by publishers have tended to have a higher research rating. Individual researchers may also feel that more traditional and often older professors do not value online publications.

This may be about to change. In the field of Technology Enhanced Learning, an area which would be expected to be in the forefront of any move to online publications, there are increasingly prestigious publications which are only available on line. Examples include the long established, peer review journal, First Monday, focused on the Internet, which since its launch in May 1996 has published 953 papers in 150 issues; these papers were written by 1,195 different authors. Equally prestigious is Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/?view=about), an open-access, peer-reviewed, online periodical  published bimonthly by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University in Canada. The journal focuses on the creative use of information technology to enhance education and training in academic, commercial, and governmental settings.

It should also be noted that the  LOCKSS system (http://www.lockss.org/lockss/Home) allows a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of a journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

One probable future trend is the merger of different media. Video is increasingly of importance with many educational projects and initiatives publishing videos on public access sites such as Youtube (http://www.youtube.com). Blogging is an increasingly important way of publishing on work in progress. Online seminars are now freely available on all manner of topics. It is likely that journals will increasingly embrace such media with text publications accompanied by video material, slidecasts (audio and slide presentations) and by online seminars to present papers and discuss issues arising from the work.

There is another option between the idea of an online ‘self published’ journal and a print journal provided by a publisher. Some universities have themselves published journals. This is not particularly technically difficult. The major problem is distribution. Most university published journals tend to come from those universities with an associated publishing house, like the University of London Press or the University of Oxford Press, who in effect operate in little different a way than commercial publishers. Recently technical innovation has led to the development of printing on demand. Although there are different financial models, typically printers charge a flat fee per print edition and an extra fee per copy. The cover price is determined by those commissioning the printing. The printers will often distribute copies themselves. Individuals can order online and the book or journal will be printed when ordered and despatched by post. It is then possible to offer both an online version for free or a hard copy for those who would prefer to have
a print volume. The economic of this require further exploration but it is a rapidly growing market. It is interesting to note that in addition to a number of commercial printers in north Germany, Hamburg University Press (http://cmslib.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/hamburg-up/content/home.xml) is now offering printing on demand. There are also technical developments in machines which allow printing of books or newspapers on demand in a bookshop or kiosk.

I am still at CEDEFOP at a conference entitled ‘Teachers and trainers at the heart of innovation and Vocational Education and Training reforms’. Snappy!

This morning I participated in an interesting workshop where we discussed the link between innovation, education and training and teachers and trainers.

Last December when I participated in a workshop organised by Jay Cross, two fundamentally different ideas were expressed on the purpose of VET. Whilst Jay said the purpose of education and training is preparing learners to adapt to their environment, I put forward the idea that education and training should  faciliate learners in changing the working environment. That, for me, is at the heart of innovation. All too often, the idea of innovation is reduced to the implementation of new technologies.  When asked what leads to innovation, particpants in the conference in Thessaloniki said creativity. But creativity requires the ability and the autonomy to shape and change the way we live and work. Indeed in the ICT and SME project in which we particpated, we found that the use of ICT for learning in small andmedium enterprises was largely dependent on the freedom they had to organise their own work. My feeling is that all too often work organisation inhibits creativity and innovation. No amount of changes in our education systems will overcome that problem. Rather, we have to look at both education and training and autonomy and responsibility in the workplace together.

I am in Thessaloniki at a conference on vocational teachers and trainers organised the the European Agency, Cedefop. Whilst everyone is convinced of the key roles  of teachers  and trainers (it is interesting that no one ever stops to question that), and agree that we need better training and professional development for trainers, there remains little agreement on how this might be done.

Presenters from OECD and the European Trades Unions ETUCE) seem convinced the answer is higher levels fo academic qualifications for teachers and trainers – the ETUCE going as far as to say all vocational teachers and trainers should have ‘Masters degree level’ qualifcations.

This, forme raises all kinds of questions related to identity. Vocational teachers have dual identities – as a teacher and as a skilled workers. Many of those responsible for the learning of others in the workplace – I prefer this clumsy phrase to the word trainer – may not even identify themselves as trainer at all, but rather as a skilled worker in their occupation.

Leaving aisde the issue of whther or not masters level qualification helps teachers and trainers in their practice, I wonder how the imposition of such an academic qualification impacts on the identity of a teacher or trainer. I wonder, too, if we are confusing competence and expertise in teaching and training with univeristy degrees?

As an aside, one thing the ETUCE speaker put forward that I agreed with was the idea of autonomous work as a competnce for teachers. But does a univeristy degree result in the development of autonomous thinking?

We have been running monthly online seminars for almost a year now through the Jisc Users and Innovations Evolve project. This spring the seminars are being run in conjunction with the German Educamp organisation.

Yesterdays session on Careers and the Internet was one of the best yet. There were two excellent and complementary  presentations by Mario Grobholz, creative director of the myON-ID Media Corporation, and Steven Warburton from Kings College London who is working on the Rhizomes project. Almost as good was the participation in the chat room with many questions and ideas emerging.

Steven focused on what he called our ‘fractured digital identities.He focused in particular on on the tensions between online personal and professional identities and public and private identities and how these were changing. Mario looked at reputation management and introduced a platform his company has developed to help people manage their reputation online.

Great stuff. The full recording is available on the Jisc Support, Synthesis and Benefits Realisation Elluminate site (no log in required). If you missed the session and are interested in these issues it is well worth watching.