I am in Leicester in the UK at a “Personal Learning Environment Expert Workshop organised by the EU ROLE project.

In one group activity this morning they asked us to discuss three questions. I twittered the questions and was surprised by the number of replies i received. So I though I would share with you your collective expertise!

But first the questions:

1. What constitutes as a PLE for you?
2. What constitutes learning ….within PLEs. Are such constituents of learning measurable and how?
3. How do you interpret ‘responsiveness” of a PLE?

And your replies (many thanks to all of you – these have been passed on to the ROLE project partners):

I had an excellent time yesterday at the UK Becta sponsored Open Source Schools unconference.

As always with Open Source events, the energy and enthusiasm of participants was encouraging.

But this was not just an event about Open Source. It was about how we can make creative use technologies to promote and support explorative learning. My keynote presentation will be available on video and audio next week, I am told. But one of my main points was that the idea of bricolage, as put forward by Levi Strauss – about how we make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand – regardless of their original purpose – to learn and to create – applies to the learning environment just as much as to materials, documents, media etc. In other words, in the process of creating, we shape the learning environment, and the outcomes of the process of bricolage will in turn help to reshape the design of the environment. Open Source is valuable because it affords us the opportunities to shape or design its use in the learning process.

I was greatly impressed with a demonstration of the Sugar Learning platform – originally developed for the One Laptop per Child XO-1 netbook and now available to run on most computers. The sugar platform,  say the developers, promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Sugar is seen as an alternative to the traditional ‘office- desktop’ software.

I am certainly going to have a play with Sugar. I think most of us in the workshop were greatly excited, despite problems we were experienced with the BT network. But what was worrying some of the teachers was just the possibilities of such interfaces for play and exploration. This, they felt, would be wonderful with 6 or 7 year old children. But, sad to tell, the UKs rigid, overcrowded and overly prescriptive curriculum leaves no time for such explorative play.

Along with John Cook and Andrew Ravenscroft from London Metropoliatn University, I have submitted a paper to the 2nd World Summit on the Knowledge Society (WSKS 2009) to be held in Crete in September. Our paper, entitled ‘Appropriating technologies for contextual knowledge: Mobile Personal Learning Environments’, looks at the potential of what we call a Work Oriented MoBile Learning Environment (WOMBLE). The abstract goes like this:

“The development of Technology Enhanced Learning has been dominated by the education paradigm. However social software and new forms of knowledge development and collaborative meaning making are challenging such domination. Technology is increasingly being used to mediate the development of work process knowledge and these processes are leading to the evolution of rhizomatic forms of community based knowledge development. Technologies can support different forms of contextual knowledge development through Personal Learning Environments. The appropriation or shaping of technologies to develop Personal Learning Environments may be seen as an outcome of learning in itself. Mobile devices have the potential to support situated and context based learning, as exemplified in projects undertaken at London Metropolitan University. This work provides the basis for the development of a Work Orientated MoBile Learning Environment (WOMBLE).”

Below is the key section of the paper explaining about the environment. And I am also attaching a word file if you wish to download the full paper. As always I would be very interested in any feedback.

“Educational technology has been developed within the paradigm of educational systems and institutions and is primarily based on acquiring formal academic and expert sanctioned knowledge.
However business applications and social software have been widely appropriated outside the education systems for informal learning and for knowledge development, through social learning in communities of practice.
Is it possible to reconcile these two different worlds and to develop or facilitate the mediation of technologies for investigative and learning and developing developmental competence and the ability to reflect and act on the environment?
Based on the ideas of collaborative learning and social networks within communities of practice, the notion of Personal Learning Environments is being put forward as a new approach to the development of e-learning tools [25,26]. In contrast to Virtual Learning environments, PLEs are made-up of a collection of loosely coupled tools, including Web 2.0 technologies, used for working, learning, reflection and collaboration with others. PLEs can be seen as the spaces in which people interact and communicate and whose ultimate result is learning and the development of collective know-how. A PLE can use social software for informal learning which is learner driven, problem-based and motivated by interest – not as a process triggered by a single learning provider, but as a continuing activity. The ‘Learning in Process’ project [27] and the APOSDLE project [28] have attempted to develop embedded, or work-integrated, learning support where learning opportunities (learning objects, documents, checklists and also colleagues) are recommended based on a virtual understanding of the learner’s context. While these development activities acknowledge the importance of collaboration, community engagement and of embedding learning into working and living processes, they have not so far addressed the linkage of individual learning processes and the further development of both individual and collective understanding as the knowledge and learning processes mature [29]. In order to achieve that transition (to what we term a ‘community of innovation’), processes of reflection and formative assessment have a critical role to play.
John Cook [30] has suggested that Work Orientated MoBile Learning Environments (Womble) could play a key role in such a process. He points out “around 4 billion users around the world are already appropriating mobile devices in their every day lives, sometimes with increasingly sophisticated practices, spawned through their own agency and personal/collective interests.”
However, in line with Jenkins at al [31] it is not just the material and functional character of the technologies which is important but the potential of the use of mobile devices to contribute to a new “participatory culture.” They define such a culture as one “with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices… Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways.”
The specific skills that Jenkins and his coauthors describe as arising through involvement of “average consumers” in this “participatory culture” include ludic forms of problem solving, identity construction, multitasking, “distributed cognition,” and “transmedial navigation.”
Importantly modern mobile devices can easily be user customized, including the appearance, operation and applications. Wild, Mödritscher and Sigurdarson [32] suggest that “establishing a learning environment, i.e. a network of people, artefacts, and tools (consciously or unconsciously) involved in learning activities, is part of the learning outcomes, not an instructional condition.” They go on to say: “Considering the learning environment not only a condition for but also an outcome of learning, moves the learning environment further away from being a monolithic platform which is personalisable or customisable by learners (‘easy to use’) and heading towards providing an open set of learning tools, an unrestricted number of actors, and an open corpus of artefacts, either pre-existing or created by the learning process – freely combinable and utilisable by learners within their learning activities (‘easy to develop’). ”
Critically, mobile devices can facilitate the recognition of context as a key factor in work related and social learning processes.  Cook [33] proposes that new digital media can be regarded as cultural resources for learning and can enable the bringing together of the informal learning contexts in the world outside the institution with those processes and contexts that are valued inside the intuitions.
He suggests that informal learning in social networks is not enabling the “critical, creative and reflective learning that we value in formal education.”
Instead he argues for the scaffolding of learning in a new context for learning through learning activities that take place outside formal institutions and on platforms that are selected by learners.
Cook [30] describes two experimental learning activities for mobile devices developed through projects at London Metropolitan University. In the first, targeted at trainee teachers an urban area close to London Metropolitan University, from 1850 to the present day, is being used to explore how schools are signifiers of both urban change and continuity of educational policy and practice.
The aim of this project is to provide a contextualised, social and historical account of urban education, focusing on systems and beliefs that contribute to the construction of the surrounding discourses. A second aim is to scaffold the trainee teachers’ understanding of what is possible with mobile learning in terms of field trips. In an evaluation of the project, 91% of participants thought the mobile device enhanced the learning experience. Furthermore, they considered the information easy to assimilate allowing more time to concentrate on tasks and said the application allowed instant reflection in situ and promoted “active learning” through triggering their own thoughts and encouraging them to think more about the area
In the second project, archaeology students were provided with a tour of context aware objects triggered by different artifacts in the remains of a Cistercian abbey in Yorkshire. The objects allowed learners to expire not only the physical entity of the reconstructed abbey through the virtual representation, but also to examine different aspects including social and cultural history and the construction methods deployed. According to Cook [30] “the gap between physical world (what is left of Cistercian), virtual world on mobile is inhabited by the shared cognition of the students for deep learning.”
The use of the mobile technology allowed the development and exploration of boundary objects transcending the physical and virtual worlds. Boundary objects have been defined as “objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds.” [33].  The creation and management of boundary objects which can be explored through mobile devices can allow the interlinking of formal and academic knowledge to practical and work process knowledge.
Practically, if we consider models for personalized and highly communicative learning interaction in concert with mobile devices, whilst employing context aware techniques, startling possibilities can arise. For example, we can combine the immediacy of mobile interaction with an emergent need for a collaborative problem solving dialogue, in vivo, during everyday working practices, where the contextual dimensions can constrain and structure (through semantic operations) the choices about a suitable problem solving partner or the type of contextualised knowledge that will support the problem solving. In brief, combining dialogue design, social software techniques, mobility and context sensitivity means we have greater opportunities for learning rich dialogues in situations where they are needed – to address concrete and emergent problems or opportunities at work.
Such approaches to work oriented mobile learning also supports Levi Strauss’s idea of bricolage [34]. The concept of bricolage refers to the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signifying objects to produce new meanings in fresh contexts. Bricolage involves a process of resignification by which cultural signs with established meanings are re-organised into new codes of meaning. In such a pedagogic approach the task of educators is to help co-shape the learning environment.
Of course, such approaches are possible using social software on desktop and lap top computers. The key to the mobile environment is in facilitating the use of context. This is particularly important as traditional elearning, focused on academic learning, has failed to support the context based learning inherent in informal and work based environments.
Whilst the use of context is limited in the experiments undertaken by London Metropolitan University, being mainly based on location specific and temporal factors, it is not difficult to imagine that applications could be developed which seek to build on wider contextual factors. These might include tasks being undertaken, the nature of any given social network, competences being deployed, individual learner preferences and identities and of course the semantic relations involved.”

You can download the full paper here

Yes, F-Alt is back by popular demand. F-ALT is a fringe event organised to coincide with the annual UK Association for Learning Technology annual conference. This Year ALT-C will be back in sunny Manchester!

As the F-Alt09 wiki says: “Spurred on by the fantastic success of F-ALT 08, we’re looking forward to an even more fabulous series of unconference events.”

F-ALT 09 will consist of a variety of sessions held in public, conference and university spaces. Delegates are encouraged to experiment with format, with slots focusing discussion and allowing participants and bystanders to experiment with an alternative conference format. Participants pick the topics they are most interested in debating and negotiate session delivery on the F-Alt wiki.

So don;t forget – if you have session ideas – stick them up on the wiki and the detail can be worked later. And if you are coming to F-Alt, don’t forget to signup

Yesterday we held the first of a series of online conferences for the Jisc SSBR project which supports the 40 odd projects presently being funded under the Jisc Institutional Innovation programme.

We gad about 70 attending the confernce which used Elluminate as the main platform. I have organised and participated in a lot of on-line events over the past 18 months and though we have much experience in organising such events by now we are still, I think, in a learning curve. Therefore it is worth a  few reflections on what works, what doesn’t and what might be improved.

First something (short) about my main role in the event. We ‘wrapped’ the conference in an internet radio show, broadcasting before the conference opened, at the coffee, lunch and tea breaks and with a  follow up evening programme. the daytime broadcasts were also streamed into Elluminate and we continued on internet radio in the morning to allow those not registered for the conference to listen to John Cook’s keynote speech on ‘Surfing the Moble Wave’ (podcast available here shortly). I think this worked well. To get the stream into Elluminate is easy – we merely hijacked the feed as a microphone in Elluminate. Although the sound quality in Elluminate is not great, from what people tell me the radio provided continuity to the conference.

In the main event the presentations went well. we are well rehearsed in organising and moderating these by now. The one thing we were most nervous about was moving people into breakout groups in the afternoon. Somewhat surprisingly this worked well at a technical level. However people felt that these sessions were too short. And one session in the morning where we invited people to give short reports to the whole room was not so successful. Overtly the problem was technical, with sound breaking up and poor quality audio at other times. I am not quite sure what the problem was. It may be lack of bandwidth from participants although elluminate claims to work on low bandwidth. More likely I suspect, was poor quality headsets. The quality of the microphone seems to make a huge difference for online presenters. I also think that 70 is too many people to organise a high degree of interaction in online events. Merely managing so many provides problems. If we want to organise interaction, participation and discussion in large online conferences, it is probably better to divide into groups with feedback in short plenaries.

As always in such conferences when technical problems occur, people were extolling the virtue of various different platforms. I am unconvinced that any are better than Elluminate. However some rethinking of the user interfaces would be helpful. especially to make groups management easier (allowing people to move themselves int0 a group would be good – anyone listening at Elluminate? – and also a larger chat box).

At the end of the day, organising and managing online confernces is not that different form face to face events. But there are some significant differences and we still need to keep thinking how we can best facilaite interaction in online events.

Yesterday I received a message from Miles Berry reminding me I had agreed to deliver a keynote at the Open Source Schools conference in Nottingham on 20 June (have to admit it had slipped my mind!). So I searched the web to dig out what the conference was all about and arrived at the conference wiki.

What a fabulous site! This is an unconference with contributors being invited to develop themes, presentations and and collaboration around sessions being through the wiki. This exemplifies what I have been banging on about for the last few months. We need to use technologies – not just as a teaching tool – but to shape and reshape our own practices. As a community of practice we need to explore how we can use the potential of social software in our own daily practice for collaboration, for our own (collective learning) and for developing and sharing knowledge within our community. And that practice will inevitably change how we have traditionally organised our work – for instance through conferences seminars and publications.

This is also true of research into technology enhanced learning. It is almost impossible to research the use of technologies for learning  without experiencing the use ourselves. This not only means using technology as an adjunct or aid to more effective research practices but also rethinking methodologies towards a more action research oriented approach.

Congratulations to Miles and his colleagues for having a go!

This Thursday features a day of LIVE internet radio to support the Jisc Institutional Innovation programme online conference on Institutional Impact.

We will be broadcasting four programmes during the day.

The Morning Programme

The morning programme starts at 10.00 CET (9.00 UK Summer Time) and will run until 1215 CET. The will feature music and chat. At around 11.00 CET we will brodacst Professor John Cook’s keynote speech on “Scaffolding the Mobile Wave”

• How can learning activities that take place outside formal  institutions, on platform of the learners choice, be brought  into institutional learning? New digital media can be regarded as cultural resources that can  enable the bringing together of the informal learning contexts in  the world outside the institution with those processes and contexts  that are valued inside the intuitions. The big problem is that reports show that Social Software and Google  are not enabling the critical, creative and reflective learning that  we value in formal education.
  

The Lunch Time Show
The lunch time broadcast will be from 1400 – 1430 CET (1300 – 1330 UK Summer Time. The show will feature interviews with Ruth Drysdale from Jisc and David Morris plus more music.

The Afternoon Show
The mid afternoon show from 1600 – 1630 CET (1500 – 1530 UK Summer Time)  will feature guest slots from Howard Noble from the Low Carbon ICT project and from Luis Francisco Pedro form Portugal on introducing PLEs throughout the institution.

The Evening Show
The evening show kicks off at 1930 CET 18.30 UK summer Time. Besides providing a chance for quick reflections on the conference, it will also be featuring interviews with leading researchers and practitioners on institutional innovation from all over Europe (we have some great gusts lined up – I will try to provide you with a trailer for them tomorrow). From 2000 CET (1900 UK Summer Time) onwards it will also be streamed into Second Life for participants in the Institutional Innovation conference social event. The show ends at 2030 CET (19.30 UK Summer Time).

How to listen to the programme.
You can access the internet radio feed by going to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u in your browser. This will open the stream in your MP3 programme of choice (e.g, iTunes).

Please feel free to just sit back and enjor the show. But if you would like to come on the show live to provide your reflections and ideas about the issues being discussed then please skype or email Graham Attwell – graham10 [at] mac [dot] com or GrahamAttwell on skype.

June is the month of meetings and i seem to have been in meetinsg for ever. Just a short few hours break before the next ones start so time for a quick bog entry.

This morning I received an email from Effie Law from the University of Leicester, UK/ ETH Zürich, Switzerland.

“Dear Graham,” she said, “I am now working … to develop an evaluation framework on widgets. In the meantime, we have identified several conceptual issues that your rich expertise and experience in widgets can help us resolve them.

May we ask you to kindly complete the following mini-survey for us.”

I love a flattering email as much as anyone else but I am afraid Effie seriously over rates my expertise. But she did conclude her email by saying “Please forward this message to those whom you think should respond to this survey as well”. So I am forwarding it to you, my blogreaders, in ther hope some of you can shine light on the questions Effie asks. Please just reply below and I will pass all answers on.

Here are the questions:

Q1. Questions about Portlets
1a) Please give your definition of portlets

1b) Please list specific characteristics (=attributes, properties) of portlets

1c) Please list specific features (=functionalities) of portlets

Q2. Questions about Widgets
2a) Please give your definition of widgets

2b) Please list specific characteristics (=attributes, properties) of widgets

2c) Please list specific features (=functionalities) of widgets

Q3. Please tell us, what do YOU consider as the major differentiator(s) between:
3a) Portlets and Widgets? (cf. Wikipedia on Web widget)

3b) Widgets and Java Applets? (cf. W3C Widget requirements)

Q4. Please share with us YOUR ideas how to evaluate:
4a) Portlets?

4b) Widgets?

Regular readers of this blog will know I have been much concerned lately with how we organise research in technology enhanced learning, and particularly with the organisation of the various seminars, conferences and publications associated with academic research. One issue that has bothered me is the gap between the radical pedagogies we often propose and the actual practice of the ways we organise our own learning. A second is the difficulties frequently encountered by post graduate researchers, because of the interdisciplinary of Technology Enhanced Learning research, problems in defining and developing methodologies and the too frequent problem of finding adequate supervision and support for their work.

Last weeks IATEL conference in Darmstadt was a breath of fresh air in this respect. The conference on ‘Interdisciplinary approaches to Technology Enhanced Learning’ was organised by the DFG Research Training Group E-Learning. As the introductory handout said: “As a direct consequence of such an interdisciplinary approach, the conference format will not be defined by a preponderance of presentations and papers. In separately moderated and creative discussion forums one is able to examine and work towards a common understanding of the issues at stake. such an approach should also enable an assessment of how and to what extent the idea of interdisciplinary research is sustainable: whether it simply brings forth an only loosely fitting framework, or whether it evolves into a truly encompassing project that leads to results, insights and solutions which go beyond the simple sum of the individual trajectories.”

I was in the group looking at learning in networks and it truly was a fascinating discussion (many thanks to the moderators).

I came away thinking about three issues. The first is the tension between how people are using technologies for living, working and learning outside institutions and institutional practice in TEL (I was dubbed a ‘real world devil’ !!). The second was the need to bring together ‘design’ and TEL. Why the scare quotes? In this context ‘design’ is an English translation of the German word ‘Gestaltung’ which I would tend to translate as ‘shaping’ – the idea that technology – and in this context Technology Enhanced Learning – needs to be shaped by users. In other words we need to move beyond adaptive systems to systems and technologies that learners can themselves adapt to their own purposes and learning. The third issue was the relationship between Technology Enhanced Learning and its impact on education with the concept of ‘Beruf’. ‘Beruf” is very difficult to translate – there is no equivalent English language world. I would suggest the easiest way to understand it is in relation to the debates over the meaning of competency which in the UK and Anglo Saxon countries such as the Netherlands tends to be seen as the ability to perform to a set of externally defined standards, but in Germany is taken to mean the internalised ability of an individual to act. But please, German speakers, feel free to elaborate in the comments. Thus education is seen not just as aiming towards higher skills and knowledge for employment but as having more holistic aims in terms of value in itself.

I am still thinking about the ideas from the conference. And the work will continue – one outcome for the project should be a book and I am happy to have been invited to participate in writing this.

For years past, projects have routinely included electronic and video conferencing as a means of communication between meetings. Of course, this rarely happened. Ultimately, the technology was not up to it. But in the last two years, with improvements in bandwidth and the release of new and better platforms, video conferencing has become common, for project meetings and discussions for seminars and dissemination and for conferences and events.

In my experience, organising an online event is not much easier (or that matter different) from organising a face to face meeting. And moderating such events is similar in many ways. But of course there are some differences. This afternoon I am moderating (along with Josie Fraser) the first of three short events for the Jisc SSBR project, on how to run events using the Elluminate platform. Over the last year I have run regular events, using both Elluminate and the open source (and free) Flash meeting service. Although feature sets differ, I do not think there are great differences in how to plan and run online events, dependent on platform.

Yesterday, I tried to write my ten tips for online moderators. Here I share them on the blog, and in line with my attempts to crowd source presentations, would welcome additions and comments from readers.

1. Schedule time for participants to try out the software. Ideally participants should have the opportunity to test and explore the software in a sandbox in an advance of a meeting, with online help available. This is especially important if presenters have not used a platform before. Most technical problems are with microph0ne and video settings and can easily be solved. But this can be disruptive when a meeting has started.
2. Open the room 30 minutes before the session. A simple tip but often forgotten. People usually turn up to meetings a little early. If the room is not open this is confusing and off-putting.
3. Greet the participants as they arrive and prompt people informally to try out the microphone and try the text box – if they arrive ahead of time.
4. If no-one is talking it is very quiet! This is one of the big differences to face to face meetings. there you can see people and see what is happening. In online meetings if no-one is talking it is impossible to know what is going on. Thus, in the run up to a meeting, the moderator should encourage informal chat, if only to provide a context for what is happening.
5. Before stating the session remember the housekeeping tips. People normally know the social rules for face to face meeting interaction. Such rules are less transparent in online platforms. And even if users are experienced in online meetings, it is worth quickly running through the platform features.
6. Remember online sessions can be tiring – shorter may be better. This is a big one for me. Following online presentations and online interaction using different media requires a lot of concentration. Allow regular breaks between sessions. But also think about the length of presentations. Consider breaking up longer presentations into sections to allow participants to respond.
7. How you run the session will depend to an extent on how many people there are. Like most of these tips, the same applies to face to face sessions. Managing large numbers of people in an online session can be difficult – especially if you want to use break out sessions. It can be useful to have several moderators with different roles – for example one person moderating the audio, another monitoring the chat for useful comments and another handling technical difficulties. Elluminate allows multiple microphones – this seems to help interaction in smaller meetings but can be difficult to manage in larger conferences.
8. Encourage interaction – using audio, text and the whiteboard. One of the bonuses of online meeting platforms is that they provide multiple channels for simultaneous interaction. Although participants often find the chat channel distracting initially, it often offers a rich parallel communication to the audio. Presenters may find it too difficult to follow whilst making their presentation so it can be useful for the moderator to summarise questions and key contributions from the chat. The white board can also allow interaction – although presenters need confidence on how to use this productively.
9. Learn to listen. A bit obvious. But all too often, moderators write their scripts in advance and plough on regardless of what people are saying or writing. Remember you are there to guide and moderate the meeting – not to act as a presenter yourself. That means you have to be very concentrated on what is going on and sometimes to prompt and guide the discussion.
10. Back channels can be useful. A small tip but it may be useful. I have found that having a skype channel open to the other moderators is useful for communicating during the course of the meeting.

Those are my tips. What are yours?