Much as I enjoy doing presentations at conferences it does seem oh some Web 1.0 ish. So i am working on how to make such events a little more interactive. Twitter is great – if conference organisers can make available a second screen at events. At least then people can ask questions during the presentation (I always tell people they are free to interrupt me but they seldom do). I have messed with buzz groups during the presentation but this always seems a little artificial.

I like the presentation Dave Cormier did at the WIAOC conference last weekend. I wasn’t at it, neither have I watched the video but his community crowd sourced slides both provide a wealth of shared learning and give the impression the event was a lot of fun. For explanation of the idea behind it see his blog.

I am going to try doing something like that next week at the ProLearn Summer School in Zilina.

I have just been writing a long overdue abstract for my keynote presentation at the DFG Research Training Group E-Learning conference on Interdisciplinary approaches to technology-enhanced learning (IATEL) in Darmstadt in June.

I was not quite sure what to talk about – the overall theme I was given is Learning in Networks – from learning in the Network to the learning Network and back.

So I am crowdsourcing the abstract to blog readers. What have I missed out? What other ideas should I include? All contributors will get a citation on the final slide!

Abstract

Graham Attwell will look at the evolution of learning networks.

The presentation will also look at the development of educations systems and the spread of mass education through an industrial model with curriculum based on expert knowledge. He will go on to examine key issues including control at the level of content, institutions and curriculum.

The presentation will look at the changing ways people are learning and developing and sharing knowledge using Web 2.0 and social software tools. Such practice is facilitating the development of personal learning pathways and integration within dispersed communities if practice.

The presentation will examine recent ideas and theory about learning in networks including the idea of rhizomatic curricula and connectivism.

As learning networks become more important, the issue of digital identities is attracting more attention. How do individuals interact in learning networks and whet is the role of tools such as Twitter? How important is the idea of place within learning networks?

The presentation will consider how learning takes place in Personal Learning Environments drawing on the work of Levi Stauss on bricolage and Goffman’s dramatulurgical perspective.

Finally the presentation will consider the implication of ideas of learning in networks and Pe

The Guardian newspaper has published a very level headed article about the findings of the recently published UK report on “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World.”

I haven’t read the report yet (it is on today’s to do list) but according to the press release “findings from the report show that students typically spend four hours a day online, a figure that looks set to rise as teenagers make increasing use of Web 2.0 technology in their daily lives.  One of the challenges for the higher education sector is therefore to ensure that staff can keep pace with the advancing technology which many of their students rely on every day, using the technology to enhance the student learning experience.”

The Guardian interviewed Martin Weller and Brian Kelly. Much of what they said was predictably sensible. I was, however, intrigued by this quote from Brian Kelly.

“Some university student unions are also warning students about online ethics and the danger of slagging people off online, or posting pictures of drunken nights out that they wouldn’t want their mother or future employers to get their hands on, he says. “We’ve had no time to develop a culture. Everyone knows how to answer a telephone but it takes time for those conventions to come about, and there are no conventions for cyberspace.””

I think he is wrong. One of the remarkable things about Web 2.0 and social software is how fast cultures and especially conventions have evolved and become accepted, despite the novelty of the applications. Take Twitter. Twitter is still new and fast growing and despite the lack of any rules (or hardly any) a vibrant culture has emerged. RTs. FollowFriday. Hash tags. And so on. Just take the hashtag convention. That is emerging in a context of social use and is negotiated informally within the community of users. This is where i think Twitter get it right and Facebook get it so wrong. Twitter encourages the community to negotiate its rules and conventions. Facebook tries to impose the rules though manipulating access to APIs and data and ends up producing something which we feel we do not own. And it is the ownership and sense of ownership within the community which enable us to define our own digital identities, rather than having them imposed on us. Enough for now, but I will return to this issue.

NB Congratulations to Jisc on their latest website overhaul. The incorporation of Twitter comments and a general more Web 2.0 approach have transformed the Jisc site into an interesting and vibrant space – that is not something you can say for many institutional or agency web sites. European Commission – take note.

I attended a workshop on ‘Pedagogical innovations in new ICT-facilitated learning communities’ organised by the IPTS in Seville earlier this week. And very interesting it was too.

Sadly, though, the IPTS had nots et up a dynamic site for the workshop. No problem. We qyuickly agreed on #ipts as the hash tag for the five or six of us addicted to Twitter.

And Grainne Conole hacked together a site on the UK Open University’s alpha Cloudworks software in about ten minutes (I am very impressed with Cloudworks – if you haven’t already, give it a look).

There were extremely interesting presentations by Kirsti Ala-Mutka and Etienne Wenger. I am not great at taking notes at meetings (and was busy twittering anyway). But Grainne put together this excellent summary of Etienne’s presnetation, taken from the Cloudworks site.

Learning in practice – a social perspective, Wenger’s Community of Practice (CoP) theory. Four aspects

1. Community – Where do we belong?
2. Identity – Who are we becoming?
3. Meaning – What is our experience?
4. Practice – What are we doing?

Who are our students and how do they know who they are and how they are placed in society?

Original communities of practice theory was developed before the emergence of the web

Meaning and meanfulness are a key component of the theory BUT its about developing meaning making in the real world, situated nature of learning is crucial

There is a real issue in terms of educational systems validating informal learning – there is a real tension between vertical vs. horizontal learning. This tension is not resolvable – we need to live with it and understand the paradoxes and contradictions.

Complex inter-relationship between: space, time, locality, practice, boundary crossings between different practices. For example trainee doctor in the hospital in one practice, translation of this experience into ‘evidence for assessment purposes’ needs to then be ‘validated’ by auditors in another community of practice.

One of the trends in the perfect storm of web 2.0, communities in the 21st century which emerged around the time that CoP was developed was that organisations in the nineties were struggling with what it means to be a knowledge organisation? Some looked to CoP theory as a means of trying to address this.

At this time knowledge management was 10% technology 90% people, but much of the discourse was on the technologies but it was harder to understand the human dimensions and what this meant in terms of connections, collective understanding, etc.

Core and boundary learning
What are the implications of a theory like this for professional educational?

Think of a body of knowledge as a curriculum whereas in reality it is a system of inter-connected practices, have a set of different practices which are producing the body of knowledge which define what ‘teaching’, ‘nursing’, ‘mathematics’ is.

Therefore ideally the education for a nurse or teacher would be to find your place in that landscape of practices, to find your identity. If we think along these lines we will need to rethink our educational practice – we put too much emphasis on the mechanics of learning rather than on the development of meaning making.

A complex landscape – modes of identification
Process of identity formation

1. Imagination – how do we imagine ourselves? Imagination as an image of the world such as it makes sense of who I am
2. Engagement –
3. Alignment – way you express your belonging to the community, what you do and don’t do as part of belonging to a community
4. How does learning exist as an experience of being in the world?

First storm was organisations (both businesses and governments) trying to create horizontal communities so that they can learn from each other etc

Second storm – emergence of the web and its potential impact, but this was very much aligned with the CoP practices – a Perfect storm – peer to peer interactions, development of practices etc. The web has changed the landscape for understanding community and identity

Trends shaping technology and community – a learning agenda

• Fabric of connectivity – always on, virtual presence
• Modes of engagement – generalised self-expression, mass collaboration, creative re-appropriation
• Active medium – social computing, semantic web,, digital footprint
• Reconfigured geographies – homesteading of the web, individualisation of orientation
• Modulating polarities – togetherness and separation, interacting and publishing, individual and group
• Dealing with multiplicity – competing services, multi-membership, thin connections
• New communities – multi-space, multi-scale, dynamic boundaries, social learning spaces

In this video Jisc Emerge Project co-ordinator, George Roberts, explains the ideas behind the Emerge project and discusses how to facilitate online communities of practice.

As a member of the project team I have greatly enjoyed being involved with Emerge. However,there is an English language saying: “All good things come to an end.” And sadly the JISC Emerge project has come to the end of its funding period.

In the abstract of a forthcoming publication we explain “The Emerge project aimed to support the development of a sustainable community of practice (CoP) in the area of emerging technologies for education. This comprised individuals, groups and funded projects whose focus was around the use of social tools and services for enhancing learning and teaching. The Emerge project team developed a range of existing social software tools and practices to facilitate the needs of the emerging CoP. Seven critical phases of activity were identified during the life-cycle of the Emerge project and the CoP that grew around the JISC Users and Innovation programme. Each of these phases, from initial engagement to building for sustainability, required different support mechanisms and approaches. In response, the Emerge team adopted an agile approach to community support – adapting the tools, services and activities that were offered over time to meet emerging community needs. Our conclusions suggest that it is possible to identify a range of benefits and likely outcomes to deploying social networking and social media tools to scaffold community emergence. However, the form and patterns of interaction that develop across a community over time cannot be approached prescriptively. There is a need to be sensitive to the dynamic and changing needs of the community and its’ processes and meet the changing demands for meaningful social and collaborative spaces. This impacts on the type and form of the tools and services that need to be made available to the community. Deploying an iterative and agile model to scaffold the community is a key factor to active participation by its membership and the successful development of community identities. In this way it is possible to define and support a community centre which anchors distributed practice in a manageable and accessible way.”

For now, the Emerge project web site has been suspended, although public posts may still be searched and accessed. A new Emerge Reports site also provides access to the products of the project. As George Roberts says in an email to Emerge site members “One key message from our analysis is that a community has many modes of participation. It would be a mistake to assume that the presence of a website indicates either the presence or absence of a community. There is a network of people who have been very active in creating the Users and Innovation Programme and the Emerge community. This network of people persists. Discussions are ongoing concerning how this network might make its presence visible on the Internet or if a site similar to this one might be required.”

My personal view is that there is a space for such a network or community presence, based on the exchange of practice in Technology Enhanced Learning. How such a presence can be facilitated, governed and resourced is another issue.

In the meantime, my thanks to George and all the other members of the team what have made working on the Emerge project so interesting and enjoyable.

Also many thanks to Dirk for a magic editing job on this video.

Great discussions on learning and communities at a workshop hosted by IPTS in Seville. I particularly enjoyed the contribution by Ettiene Wenger this morning (see Wordle of twitterstream above).  I have been twittering the event and will write a longer post when i have 20 minutes to spare. In the meantime Grainne Conole has set up an excellent Cloudworks site for the event and you can also follow the twitter traffic by searching on the #ipts09 tag.

“But the more interesting question is whether this will mean any change in the culture of Facebook – always assuming that it has any discernible culture.”

An interesting question raised in an otherwise somewhat flip article in the Guardian, commenting on the news that most Facebook users are over 25 and the fastest growing demographic group on Facebook are woman over 55, according to new research from Inside Facebook. (The article is curious, the author appears unsure as to whether a newspaper of the Guardian’s perceived gravitas should report seriously on the demographic makeup of Facebook users).

One thing this research does confirm, once again, is the misleading nature of terms like the ‘Net Generation; and ‘Digital Natives’.

But does Facebook have a discernible culture? No, I would say, Facebook is merely a social networking platform. But of course communities if users develop culture. And our use of adoption and use of tools and media help shape our cultures. Social networks are hardly new. it is just that digital platforms and tools allow the development of distributed networks – over space and time – and allow the sharing and of artefacts  developed as part of that culture. witness the way Blip.fm (yes I know I keep going on about it) allows us to develop networks and communities around music.

According to Wenger (1998), a community of practice defines itself along three dimensions:

• What it is about – its joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members.
• How it functions – mutual engagement that bind members together into a social entity.
• What capability it has produced – the shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artefacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time. (see, also Wenger 1999: 73-84).

Most communities on Facebook or Blip.fm are not communities of practice as defined by Wenger. They might better be defined as communities of interest. But they do show features of the different dimensions identified by Wenger especially in terms of capability and that capability is in turn mediated by tools in the form of affordances. And yes, of course communities have cultures!

References

Wenger, E. (1998) ‘Communities of Practice. Learning as a social system’, Systems Thinker, http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml. Accessed March 27, 2009.

Wenger E 1999, Communities of Practice. Learning, meaning and identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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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It is the season of predictions for 2009. Here is mine – 2009 will be the year of Open Education. Seminars, workshops, lectures, courses – all available on line and for free. I am not sere I trust my  star-gazing ability – or my ability to predict technology development trends for that matter – so we are doing our best to make sure it comes true by organising a series of events ourselves.

Over the next few days I will be posting details of a whole series of different events. First up, here is the spring Open Seminar series being organised by the JISC Evolve network in collaboration with the German Educamp Network who are staging a series of conferences around Web2.0 social software and elearning. is organising the third EduCamp in Germany.

Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar Live

26 January 1900 CET, 1800 UK time – Dragons Den special – Learning and Multi user Virtual Environments

23 February 1900 CET, 1800 UK time – The reality of communities

March 2009 – time and date ot be announced – LIVE broadcast from JISC Emerge conference.

You can listen live to all the programmes by going to http://tinyurl.com/6df6ar in your web browser. This will open the live stream in your MP3 player of choice.

Emerging Mondays Seminars

The open online seminars will take place on the Elluminate platform. We will announce the address for the events shortly, together with the final line line up of presenters. Each seminar will feature tow short introductions with most time being given over to discussion.

PLEs and E-Portfolios – is this the future of education?
January, 19th 2009, 1900 CET, 1800 UK time. Click here for access to Elluminate.
Speakers: Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu
Moderators: Thomas Bernhardt and Marcel Kirchner

• What does a PLE look like?
• What is PLE? A technical concept or a pedagogic method?
• How can we use e-Portfolios and PLEs in practice?What is the difference between a PLE and an E-Portfolio?
• Is the PLE the future of education?

Careers and the Internet – how does Web 2.0 impact on our Online Reputation and Identity
February, 16th 2009 – 1900 CET, 1800 UK time. Click here for access to Elluminate.
Speakers: Steven Warburton, Kings College, Eduserve funded Rhizomes project
Moderators: Cristina Costa and Marcel Kirchner

• How can we use E-Portfolios and other tools for applying for jobs and building identities
• The risks and opportunities in developing a web identity
• Privacy 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 – the potential of Social Software for learning in enterprises
March, 16th 2009 – 1900 CET, 1800 UK time. Click here for access to Elluminate.
Speakers: Timothy Hall, University of Limerick, Ireland
Moderators: Cristina Costa and Steffen Büffel

• How is social software being used for learning in enterprises
• Can social software support communities of practice
• How can social software support informal learning

Edupunk – Free the educational system
April, 6th 2009 1900 CET, 1800 UK time
Speakers: Dr. Martin Ebner and Steven Wheeler, University of Plymouth
Moderators: Thomas Bernhardt, Marcel Kirchner and Cristina Costa

• Edupunk – hype or reality
• Does e-teaching need a pedagogical apprenticeship?
• Why and how far students should be involved in the developing process of courses?

ThoughtFest 09

5-6 March, Salford, Manchester, UK
Thought Fest is a two-day event being organized by Pontydysgu with the support of the JISC Evolve network and
the European Mature-IP project.

The event will bring together researchers in Technology Enhanced Learning in an open forum to debate the current issues surrounding educational technologies and discuss how and where research impacts on practice and where practice drives research.

Whilst there will be keynotes by Graham Attwell and Steven Warburton, Thought Fest is a user driven workshop and we welcome ideas for sessions, demontsrations activities. Accomodation and food for free – you juts have to pay for your travel.

More details here or sign up on this page.

Educamp
April 17th – 19th
Venue: Ilmenau, Thuringia, Germnay
What is the EduCamp all about?
The EduCamp-Network (http://educamp.mixxt.de/) is organising the third EduCamp in Germany. This will also be the first international EduCamp. The event will take place from the 17th to the 19th of April, 2009 in Ilmenau, Thuringia. Details of previous EduCamps can be found at http://educamp.mixxt.de.

There will be some initial structure for the programme, but after the panel discussion on Friday, the EduCamp will be organized as a barcamp. Sessions and workshops will be organised by participants at the beginning of the event. On Sunday the topic under discussion is “EduOpenSpace” (OpenSpace?). Participants will form clusters to discuss some of the related topics.

Topics
The issue of how we can use social software, such as weblogs, podcasts, wikis, micro-blogging, VoIP in education in schools, universities and companies is a subject attracting much interest. Developing connections to other people and joining learning networks is central to the Information society. Mulitple knowledge resources all access to the exchange of experiences and the construction of knowledge.

The last EduCamps meeting discussed ‘Teaching and Learning 2.0’. This meeting will continue those discussions.

EduCamp is an open event and everyone interested in welcome to attend. It will take place at the Humboldtbau at the Technical University of Ilmenau.

The main topics for the EduCamp are Corporate Learning 2.0 and e-learning in schools or universities. Other topics include the use of E-Portfolios, Digital games and virtual worlds in education. In line with the idea of barcamp, everyone is invited to propose their own topics for discussion.

Posted below is a PDF copy of a new book: ‘Creating Learning Spaces: Training and Professional Development of Trainers’. the hard back copy will be published early in the new year. The book comes out of the two year TTPlus project on professional development for trainers. The project involved researchers from six European countries and was coordinated by Eileen Luebcke from Pontydysgu and funded by The European Commission Leonardo da Vinci programme.

At the heart of the project was the aim to develop a Framework for the Continuing Professional Development fo trainers. But we had also set out to look at who is responsible for training, what trainers do in practice and how training is changing. In fact, considering how much is talked about the importance of training, it is quite remarkable how little is known about who the trainers are and what they do.

We found that increasing numbers of people are responsible for training as part of their work – as skilled workers, as team leaders or as managers. Very often they do not have the word trainer as their job title, neither do they identify themselves as a trainer. In some cases responsibility for training comes as part of the job, in other cases they were selected because they appeared to have an aptitude for the role. In some cases they had some prior experience of teaching, in others they attended some courses but in many cases they had no training or professional development as trainers. We found that whilst there were differences between countries, especially in regulatory regimes, in terms of practice and changes in practice nationality was not a particularly significant variable in what trainers do. In all the cases we examined there appeared to be a move towards more work based learning and more use of technology for learning. This is important as most studies of trainers in Europe have started from a comparative methodology based on country. We wanted to go beyond this and examine the real practice of trainers. This involved talking to trainers themselves, talking to learners and talking to managers in different companies in the six countries involved.

We felt that if the standards of training are to be raised, improving the training of trainers must be a priority.  However, given the heterogeneous nature of the group and the range of sectors and occupations in which they work, it is difficult to see how this could be standardised, or indeed whether it is desirable to do so.  Certainly some sort of common framework would have advantages. It would provide a degree of coherence to what is a very fragmented field. It would increase the visibility of trainer training and in so doing, increase awareness. It could also stimulate the establishment of communities of practice between trainers.

Previous attempts at solving this problem can be roughly divided into two:

a)    Competence framework approaches
An output based solution that depends on disaggregating the skills and competences that have been identified as necessary for skilled performance. It is often used as a way of providing recognition for the skills already possessed by the trainer, typically though the compilation of a portfolio of evidence. It will also highlight missing competences so that the trainer can see which areas they need to develop. The disadvantages are:

• It is essentially a backward-mapping exercise – recognizing and rewarding competences rather than providing opportunities for new learning.
• There are invariably problems with granularity and with designing a credible classification system.
• It identifies gaps in skills and knowledge but does not fill them.

b)    Qualifications approach
An input based approach that depends on increasing the professionalisation of trainers by providing accredited training-the-trainer opportunities, which lead to formal qualifications, hierarchically arranged. The assumption is that the provision of higher levels of trainer training and thus higher-level qualifications for trainers will push up standards of the training they deliver. The major problems with this approach are:

• This can only operate on an individual level and is not transferable to organizations
• There is an issue around occupational identities. Many ‘trainers’ do not see themselves as trainers per se, their occupational identity being based on being a skilled worker or manager but who still have some responsibility for facilitating the learning of colleagues.
• It implies that progression for trainers is ‘vertical’ whereas in practice many of the trainers’ learning needs will be lateral. That is, they may want more knowledge or skills at the same and not a higher level.
• The assumption that if qualifications are higher and harder then standards somehow go up, is unproven. In countries with a formal training-the-trainer framework (e.g. UK) there is little research evidence to suggest this.

Instead of a competence based approach we have developed a series of principles and a series of standards, together with a flexible accreditation process. The principles include the recognition of the importance of:

• trainers in facilitating learning and the role of learning for individual competence development and organisational development
• different modes of learning and different modes of assessing learning
• different roles people play in training and learning
• opportunities for initial and continuing professional development
• opportunities of opportunities to practice
• networking
• partnerships
• the development of tools and platforms
• ongoing research and monitoring

The standards are expressed in the form of a series of commitments. The commitments are not only for individual trainers, but for teams, organisations and enterprises and governmental bodies. The proposed accreditation framework supports a process of trainers (or organisations) themselves deciding on what steps they wish to take to meet the different commitments and then of developing a portfolio or evidence to show that they have achieved this. We have also provided examples of the sort of measures they might tackle.

We have discussed the Framework with trainers and other people involved in training and there is considerable enthusiasm for our approach. In the next year we hope to further develop the framework and to run a series of pilots.

Personally I am very happy with this work. We have moved beyond competences to place practice and learning at the centre of the Framework. I would love to hear your comments on the book. And if you are interested in working with us please leave a comment or email Graham Attwell.

To download the book click here.

Last weeks Emerging Mondays seminar was on the topic of MOOCs and Open Course Models. The speaker was Dave Cormier from the University of Prince Edward Island.

Dave spoke about his experiences, so far, of the CCK MOOC on Connectivism and Connected Knowledge, the technological platforms being used to support participants, the tensions that exist within the course design and the peer support models that are being embraced.  Dave’s introduction led to a wide ranging discussion including the nature and furture of courses and communities, issues of scale, how to support learners, open accreditation and the future of open education – and …Humpty Dumpty and Alice in Wonderland!

If you missed the session – or would like to hear it again – we are providing you with three different versions. You can watch a replay of the event in Elluminate. This provides you with access to the sidebar chat discussion as well as to the audio.

Or – if you are short of time you can listen to an MP3 podcast of Dave’s introduction.

Or you can listen to the full session inline or on your MP3 player.

This is the link to the Elluminate version.

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