Don’t know how I missed this one. This is a great diagramme by Scott Wilson. It overcomes a whole series of issues in the relations between the Personal Learning Environment and institutional provision and systems. By proposing a lightweight coordination space, separated from the ‘regulatory space’ Scott allows institutions to manage their course enrollments and provisions whilst till allowing learners to use their own tools in their own environment. More fundamentally students do not have to have their own PLE – a worry that I have bothered about for some time.

Now we just need to try the system out!!

Last year the Bazaar project held a seminar called Hey Dude – Where’s my Data. The title, somewhat ironically was coined by Dave Tosh. In the run up to the seminar we posed the following issues and questions:

“With Web 2.0, more and more people have their documents, products, personal details and photos stashed all over the internet – what issues does this raise for education?

The rise of commercial services:

With the use of free, commercial, centrally hosted, social software services rising in education some important issues arise; Who controls this data? Do users care that commercial services are mining their usage patterns and selling this to marketing companies? Is the nature of these ‘free’ services understood – yes users can come in and use the base system for free but often, in return, they are bombarded with advertising and their details/usage habits sold. However, does anyone really care? Perhaps convenience of service outweighs the perceived downsides.

As Bill Fitzgerald points out: “This type of commercial activity is sneaky – it is not apparently obvious to the user what is happening to their data and usage patterns, so often they will not thing about this.”

Is it wise to build up learning environments around these free-to-use tools? While it is unlikely some of the bigger services, such as Flickr, will shutdown – the terms of usage could certainly change, what happens if learners suddenly have to pay to access their content?

As Graham Atwell points out: “Yes Web 2 is great for allowing mash ups and integrating services to produce rich and interactive web sites. But the reliance on external services from mostly commercial companies does raise a whole series of issues. Can we trust these people with our data? will we still have access to this data in the future.? What is to stop them data mining for their own purposes?”

Is there an alternative?

Open Standards

Surely the way to approach this is to build educational tools based on open standards, not specific, commercial, services? This will remove any reliance on services like flickr or del.icio.us. Then again, who would be responsible for building and maintaining these tools? Should institutions and perhaps government be responsible?

Open Source

The same issues arise – who is responsible for building, maintaining and paying for the service?

Where to store my data:

With the rise in popularity of ePortfolios many have asked what happens to an ePortfolio after the student has left the institution? What happens to this content – where are learners supposed to store it? Can they still access it?

At least one UK university is considering charging alumni for continued access to their ePortfolio – is this the correct approach?

Starting Points
To get you started here are some rough questions:

• Data mining on commercial services, is this a problem?

• Should institutions using commercial services worry about the user data being sold to advertising and marketing companies?

• Is it not a risky strategy to rely on commercial services keeping their services ‘free’?

• Does anyone really care? Some of these services are excellent so perhaps we should accept that their might be some downsides and instead concentrate on the pedagogical benefit they can offer?

• Who would pay for something if it was not commercial service providers – the government? Would we trust that more? Would the services actually be as good?

• What role should governments play, if any at all?

• What is the role of institutions?

• Security issues?

• Ownership issues?”

The position papers and discussions from the seminar can be found on the project wiki. But whilst we saw the answers largeluy in individual ownership of data with backups etc and interoperability standards we missed teh issue of community. Individuals can transfer their data from Eduspaces with its impending closure. But at a technical level it is tricky to back up and restore comments. Moreover links to individual posts will be lost – as will the community context of the discussion. In other words communities may be more than a blog and whilst back ups and interoperability and standards may allow us to safeguard our individual data it does little for communities.

Like Stephen, I am usually the first to support any iniative around Open Content. And I am a great fan of the OECD Open Educational resources project. But like Stephen, I also have serious reservations about the Cape Town open Education Declaration.

Stephen says” First, the document promotes a view of learning rooted almost completely in the educational system. We do not get any sense from the document that students can or should learn on their own, or that this movement is even for students at all. The focus in on educators sharing with each other.
“Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.”

“There is no sense of the possibility, much less the desirability, of this development being fostered by, for the benefit of, people other than educators. I would like to think and hope that we all are creating this world. I would like to think that the tradition of “sharing good ideas” is something that all people, not just educators, have in common.
More significantly, dividing the world in this way almost immediately creates practical problems. The document tells us that the open education movement “is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint.”

This significantly limits the domain of knowledge under discussion, as it contemplates only “educational resources”. Oh! What a far cry from the rather more laudable objective of Wikipedia: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”

Second, and related, the document fosters a particular culture of learning, one where content is provided and licensed by content producers, and then consumed in a particular way by learners…..”
The long simmering debate over the future of education came close to the surface in discussions at Educa Online Berlin. On the one hand there was Andrew Keen, ranting against the freedom to create open and shared knowledge, allowing “monkeys with typewriters” to have the audacity to put forward their own ideas and even more so for others to recognise these ideas. Keen blames this on a Silicon valley culture dominated by anti authoritarian ex-hippies. In truth Keen wants knowledge to be privatised, a commodity to be judged for quality by the market. Such a move would represent an extension of capitalism. and that extension of capitalism into the learning sphere was only too clear in the commericalism of the conference exhibition. This was not an exhibition about learning but an exhibition displaying commodities for sale.

The alternative vision – which I tried to outline in my speech – is that of extending the movement towards openness, the movement which allows users to produce as well as consume, the movement towards learners being able to control their own learning environment – extending that movement so that learners themselves can shape the total learning environment. And that means recognising the different contexts in which learning takes place, recognising different forms of learning and above all recognising and valuing these different forms and contexts of learning. That of course represents a challenge to those institutions that have assumed they have a monopoly on learning – the universities and research institutes. that is not to say that universities and schools have no place in the future – neither am I trying to deny that formal learning can be important and appropriate.

But this is just the reason why it is so important that The Capetown declaration gets it right. There is a debate going on on the Unesco list serve over the declaration. But this mainly seems to be centred on whether we should use the term ‘libre’ or ‘open’. To me that is not the most important issue. Far more important is a vision of learning in the future. And to extend access to lifelong learning for all we need new visions, visions that go beyond commercialisation and beyond the present schooling system.

Whilst at Online Educa Berlin, I was interviewed by colleagues from the Swedish Learning Space on the future of e-learning. I visited their stand later. amongst the usual frenzy of commercial stands, all desperately trying to sell bits of technology which looked depressingly alike, it was a pleasure to find thoughtful people willing to spend time discussing ideas.

Anyway you can watch the video on the Swedish Learning Space web site.

If you are interested in the ideas behind my presentation at Online Educa Berlin, I have written several papers around the theme of Web 2.0 and Personal Learning Environments.

One was posted in a previous entry on the Wales Wide Web here.

A more in depth exposition of the ideas is contained in a paper called ‘E-Learning und die soziale Gestaltung der Technik’ – “e-Learning and the Social Shaping of Technology”. I am trying to find an English version of this paper. for those of you who can read German here is the introduction to the paper and a link to a download for the full paper.

Der Diskurs um die “Wissensgesellschaft”, so wie er seit mittlerweile vier Jahrzehnten in der wissenschaftlichen Öffentlichkeit geführt wird, war von Beginn an mit technikoptimistischen Annahmen verknüpft. Dabei haben in der Frühphase des Wissensgesellschaftsdiskurses die Sozialwissenschaften und die technisch ausgerichteten Wissenschaften wie Ingenieurswissenschaften oder Maschinenbau eine zentrale Rolle gespielt (Bell 1973). Während die technischen Anwendungswissenschaften mühelos nahezu jede Idee in die Praxis umzusetzen schienen, versprach man sich von den Sozialwissenschaften die Expertise, Gesamtgesellschaften so effizient steuern und planen zu können, dass selbst die kapitalistische oder real-sozialistische Verfasstheit der sozialen Einheiten eine untergeordnete Rolle spielte (Richta & Kollektiv 1972; Touraine 1972). Dieser technikoptimistische Zug hat sich bis heute gehalten, allerdings in stark modifizierter Form. Es sind nunmehr weniger die Wissenschaften selbst als die Potenziale der technisch vermittelten Medien, die die Fortschrittsprojektionen nachhaltig anregen. Eine überragende Bedeutung besitzt die Schlüsseltechnologie Computer im Zusammenhang mit dem Medium Internet. In dem vorliegenden Beitrag soll es um eine besondere Variante der Fortschrittsprojektionen gehen, die mit dem Computer und dem Internet verbunden werden: um das elektronisch gestützte oder elektronisch basierte Lernen, das so genannte E-Learning.
E-Learning ist eine relativ neue Technologie, und daher steckt auch die wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit diesem Thema noch in den Kinderschuhen. Dennoch gibt es mittlerweile eine umfangreiche Literatur zum Thema, und Lernen mittels neuer Medien wird zunehmend als eigenständige Disziplin anerkannt. Die überwältigende Mehrheit der einschlägigen Studien, und zwar sowohl die affirmativen/optimistischen wie die skeptischen, ist jedoch, bezogen auf die Technologie selbst, deterministisch, d.h. befasst sich nur mit deren Potentialen und Auswirkungen auf Bildung und Lernen, anstatt auch umgekehrt die Einflüsse des Lernens und Lehrens auf die Technik ins Auge zu fassen.

Der vorliegende Aufsatz geht von der Annahme aus, dass sowohl die Technologien selbst als auch ihre Anwendungen durch politische und soziale Prozesse geformt werden. Wenn Lernen ein sozialer Prozess ist, dann muss jede Überlegung über die Entwicklung und die Auswirkungen des E-Learning und seiner Technologien auch die sozialen, ökonomischen und kulturellen Prozesse und Diskurse mit einbeziehen, welche an der Entwicklung und Implementierung der neuen Technologien im Bildungsprozess beteiligt sind.

Dieser Aufsatzgeht davon aus, dass drei dominante Diskurse die Entwicklung und Implementierung des E-Learning geprägt haben, nämlich zunehmende Warenförmigkeit und Privatisierung von Bildung sowie drittens ein verkürzter Diskurs über lebenslanges Lernen, welche ihrerseits wieder auf allgemeineren Diskursen rund um Globalisierung und die Privatisierung des Wissens basieren.
Der Artikel beinhaltet zum einen eine Auseinandersetzung mit verschiedenen Konzepten des E-learning, aber auch mit Konzepten des informellen Lernens, so wie sie sich im Diskurs über E-learning finden lassen. Ferner wird auf Ergebnisse empirischer Forschung zurückgegriffen, die im Rahmen internationaler, EU-finanzierter Projekte erfolgte. Diese Diskurse werden im folgenden nachgezeichnet um anschließend an einigen Beispielen zu zeigen,wie sie die Entwicklung und Anwendung von E-Learning-Technologien in den jeweiligen Anwendungsfeldern beeinflußt haben.
Die Entwicklung des Kapitalismus und kapitalistischer Gesellschaften jedoch stellt sich widersprüchlich dar, nämlich als dialektischer Entwicklungsprozess und als (Klassen-)Kampf. Obwohl also bestimmte Diskurse die derzeitige Periode des Kapitalismus sehr wohl dominieren und auch die Entwicklung der E-Learning-Technologien geprägt haben, gibt es alternative und widersprüchliche Trends. Einige Kommentatoren verweisen etwa auf das E-Learning als eine Technologie mit potentieller (sozialer) Sprengkraft. Außerdem mehren sich die Hinweise darauf, dass die Lernenden selber die Technologien in anderer Weise und für andere Zwecke als die ursprünglich vorgesehenen benutzen. Zur Illustration dieser Entwicklung werde ich auf die Ergebnisse einer von der EU-Kommission finanzierten Studie über den Gebrauch von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien beim Lernen in kleinen und mittleren Unternehmen zurückgreifen. Abschließend wird der Aufsatz der Frage nachgehen, wie sich diese neuen Gebrauchsweisen von Technologie auf Bildung im digitalen Zeitalter und Möglichkeiten des Engagements in einer zivilen Gesellschaft auswirken könnten.

E-Learning und die soziale Gestaltung der Technik

Thanks to all of you for your kind comments about my keynote presentation at Online Educa Berlin. Here are the slides from the presentation. Coming soon – the video and two papers – one in English and one in German explaining the key ideas on which the presentation was based.

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OK – I screwed up on the export with the title. But still – I think – some useful ideas in this presentation on Personal Learning Environments.

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I would be delighted to host guest entries on the Wales Wide Web. I forgot to ask. But Martin Owen has emailed me saying: “I have been minded to write some things about 1994 for some time and I was prompted to write this. I think it might belong on Pontydysgu.” It certainly does, Martin. And I am honoured. Martin was one of the people who first got me hooked on technology and learning. you can read it here now. When I get the research pages sorted I will also add it there.

“I write this from a teacher’s perspective. I may write the story from a learner’s perspective later. It is a response to Graham’s piece of Nov 9th about the death of VLE’s.

This is a heresy in some circles – repositories of learning materials are not what the world needs. The idea that a teacher needs a mound of other people’s worksheets or powerpointlesses or yet –SCORM/IMS Learning Design structured learning objects is a figment of the imagination of deranged computer scientists and people who need tidy desks to remember where they put things.

I will say that having good access to some neat stuff (like a well drawn diagram of  Fleming’s Left Hand Rule which I found in seconds on Wikipedia) and sharing that knowledge with others is incredibly useful.

What was true in 1994 – when I first wrote a successful grant proposal for social media in education – is true now. Sharing and borrowing is what we need to facilitate. Sharing and borrowing are social actions. They involve reciprocity and interaction between the people who share and borrow. It comes with knowledge that the people are the source and people are the receivers of this stuff and that is quite a different mindset to the notion of a repository. They are verbs associated with communities. They come with conversations.

It is increasingly easy to find stuff and publish stuff in ways they can be found. The repository is the internet and search engines are pretty dam powerful. They both become much more powerful when people are trading ideas around what is there.

My first attempt at a “virtual learning platform” was an open access room in my University that was open ‘til late. It had 12 networked MacPlus with some networked hard drives (G. Sidhu is the unsung hero of modern computing for developing AppleTalk) with the best peripherals and software tools I could afford (Scanners etc). People met, people talked, people traded, people created together. My second attempt added FirstClass to this – which coupled with putting 56 computers into the schools where my pre-service trainee teachers were learning to teach. I learned from this.

One thing I learned is that teaching and sharing on line is not straight-forward. People who were starting using the internet for learning just then where doing things like putting up some text and the telling students to “discuss and respond” in some associated forum. The kid who was going to do well usually wrote a convincing response and the best the rest could do would be to say “me-too” or “flame”. Instruction to students needed to be structured in ways that allowed multiple responses and required students to think about how they would involve others in their learning. It needed to be like the open access room where there was borrowing, sharing and mutual support. I have some  historic advice on this.

The online environment we started to build as a European Framework 4 Telematics project REM was about a multi-media learning network (we were not building platforms or repositories- we were building tools for a learning network – a different mind-set). It had means to share and discuss resources and to build collaborative learning in a virtual resource rich environment. As with all too many projects the files now rest on an old hard disk with files dated December 2000 – the end of funding.

There was a tension in the development I am only just fully coming to understand. There was some feeling amongst the project workers that there was “a” workflow through which we would drive people. We adopted a model from a paper by Lehrer et  et al . This was constructivist in its intent – however I do not think that the authors intended it to be as hard wired as a workflow as our designs might have made it.  I think design and learning are not one-way flows or on a single track. Human activity is capable of managing multiple tracks – and prefers it that way – that is to say learning is managed by the learner – learning management is not imposed or assumed by the system. As an aside, my colleagues who promoted this system initially (with my full agreement) went on to be leading proponents of IMS Learning Design. I think at a micro level it is clearly the job of a tutor to direct attention to what is salient and more importantly provide formative feedback to students on their learning. I am far from convinced that there is a set of recipes, templates or algorithms that are the formula for teaching and learning success. I appreciate that has been a holy grail for learning technology. My 36 year career in learning technology has been littered with such visions from   Skinner  onwards. I think humans are much too good at learning to be constrained by such tracks.  I even proposed an   educational modeling language  based on conversations and meaning making (as per  Nonaka) myself.

I   do think that some of the ideas expressed about the teaching of creativity in design by  Richard Kimbell at London Goldsmiths – who proposes phases like having ideas, developing ides and testing ideas without suggesting that students might not be doing all three in some sense at any time – although design will tend to go in a general direction if it is to be completed.

But getting back to the main thread of thought. In our second phase of development of this learning network tools we engaged with a BIG international bank. What was learned from talking to their training management was that they had  profound understanding of learning in their company, that development of staff was multi-dimensional: company process knowledge; knowledge of the industry’s facts and concepts (legal frameworks, economics etc) ; generic knowledge (IT skills) and interpersonal skills and so on. Using a standardised controlled vocabulary to describe their resources or most of the wrappings of systems like SCORM did not begin to address the richness of training they needed to deliver. However they were very systematic in profiling employees, their employees career trajectories, and equally profiling the needs and skills that the company required to function as a business. They recognized they needed systems of mentoring, instruction, community building, reward-giving, need-identification, ambition fulfilling . They had their own dynamic mappings of conversations, resources and learning pathways. The pathways were never straight.

Here is a simple case example. An employee was newly charged with writing a quarterly report that demanded skills in spreadsheets and charts he had not previously had. Normal processes would have had them identify and external course provider and sent the employee out for a day at some high-cost and loss of his labour for that day. A modern trend might have been the provision of one of the many dull online courses there are in the subject. However the company had tagged or profiled one of its employees with “Excel expert” and “mentoring” attributes. The company demonstrated that having someone show you the ropes to get going and being there to help when you get stuck is quite and efficient way of learning to use software – and in the process two people were having their career developed and a community of practice was being augmented.

When Graham Attwell writes about social media tools connected together to make learning are   better than VLEs  we should think about that social process of learning and teaching. Sure we can probably do them better with loosely coupled tools but I can still make cock-ups. The way we plumb things together is significant and needs to map onto the activity system or be part of the transformation of an activity system. That is a new skill – however we are fortunate in that the tool-bag is fairly bulging with opportunity and we can add, remove, augment or find scope for new invention. We can build many tailored systems for sharing and reciprocity that are true to the context in which they work. One size, one platform, one standard does not fit all.

This edition of Sounds of the Bazaar came out a couple of weeks ago. But it was just before we launched this web site. So I am republishing it now, for those of you who may have missed the original on the Bazaar site.  And, don’t forget, Sounds of Bazaar can also be obtained from the iTunes store.

Welcome to the second of our special series of autumn shows. This series is being produced in conjunction with Online Educa Berlin. Each edition we feature some of the themes and speakers form this years Online Educa conference, being held at the end of November in Berlin.

In this show we feature two contributors to Educa. Ruth Rominger is Director of Learning Design at Monterey Institute. Ruth talks to us about the development of Open Educational resources, social authoring, sustainability models and much more.

Steve Wheeler will also be at Online Educa. He is part of a panel looking at the potential of Multi User Virtual Environments, including Second Life, for learning. In the interview Steve talks about the development of a project on sexual health in Second Life.

Web site of the month is “not School, not Home , but Schome.”

We present the second part of our interview with Stephen Downes.

And I talk about the forthcoming Bazaar conference.

The musical mix which holds it all together is the work of Dirk Stieglitz. As a good tradition the music comes again from the great music site Jamendo.com and is published under a Creative Commons licences. In this volume you listen to the band Killing Jazz and their album “2nd Round“.

We hope you will enjoy the show.

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I remember three years ago having a debate with Alexadra Toedt at a SIGOSSEE meeting in Denmark on why I thought there was no future for VLEs. I was a bit torn between wanting to promote Open Source software alternatives to Blackboard and the like but also frustrated by the pedagogic restrictions of institutional systems for managing learning. Needless to say I convinced few people at best they thought I was well meaning but hopelessly impractical.Nowadays it is becoming almost respectable to predict the end of the VLE. But fortunately we have well developed alternatives to the VLE. In any case students are voting with their feet (or mouse). Better still we have an increasingly sophisticated argument not just as to why VLEs are bad (which I have to admit was the heart of my argument but why “loosely coupled, freely available third party systems” can be better. This is from The Ed Techie blog by Martin Weller:

• “Better quality tools – because offering each of these loosely coupled elements is what each company does, it is in their interest to make them really good. This means they stay up to date, have better features, and look better than most things produced in higher education.
• Modern look and feel – related to the above, these tools often look better, and also their use makes a course feel more modern to a user who is raised on these tools compared with the rather sterile, dull systems they encounter in higher ed.
• Appropriate tools – because they are loosely coupled the educator can choose whatever ones they want, rather than being restricted to the limited set in the VLE. This is one of the biggest draws I feel – as an academic if I want a particular tool I don’t have to put a request in to IT and wait a year to get a reduced quality version, I just go ahead and use it.
• Cost – using a bunch of free tools has got to be cheaper hasn’t it?
• Avoids software sedimentation – when you have institutional systems they tend to embody institutional practice which becomes increasingly difficult to break. Having loosely coupled system makes this easier, and also encourages people to think in different ways.
• Disintermediation happens – this isn’t really a benefit, just an observation. If a services can be disintermediated then it will be. In this case the central VLE system is disintermediated as academics use a variety of freely available tools.”