There have been a number of reports in the wake of the failure of public services to prevent the tragic death of child in London. The story below from the Guardian looks at the impact of the introduction of Management Information Services in social services in the UK. What it reveals is that professional workers are forced to spend increasing amounts of time completing tick box tracking report forms on computers. The result is not increased efficiency and effectivenesss but a failure to sharing information with those that need it. The MIS becmes the centre of attention, not the task – in this case the protecion of vulnerable children.

This is not limited to social wok. Studies we have carried out in the eduction sphere reveal the same tendency. Professional wokers are being diverted away from what they see as their job in the requirement to fill in tracking reports on ill designed Management Information Systems. The inormation held by the MIS is seen as primarily for tracking and funding pruposes. raher than helping with the work. Littlle attention is paid to how an MIS might assist in developing and maturing knowledge. Natural knowledge sharing and development processes, through dialogue and networking are left behind. Often staff develop their own informal systems, to exchange the knowledge that they need, in parallel to official procedures.

We need to review the purpose of such systems. Do we develop systems to help professional wokrers in their job or merely to collect infomation? What is the purpose of the information being collected? Who is it for and why? How can we design systems based on the abilities of ‘knowledge workers’, rather than relying on the number crunching outputs of the machine? And what approaches are need to the design of such human oriented systems? These are not just academic questions, as the report below tragically reveals.

I have been working with Cristina Costa to write a review paper on Personal Learning and Working Environments. The paper is now avaiable online on the Research section of this web site.

This review paper part of a series of papers commissioned by the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick under the title of ‘Beyond Current Horizons – Working and Employment Challenge’. In turn, in forms part of a larger programme of work under the banner of Beyond Current Horizons that is being managed by FutureLab on behalf of the UK Department for Schools, Children and Families. The brief was to cover:

• The main trends and issues in the area concerned;
• Any possible discontinuities looking forward to 2025 and beyond;
• Uncertainties and any big tensions;
• Conclusions on what the key issues will be in the future and initial reflections on any general implications for education.

We had also agreed that we would produce such a paper to inform the work of the European Union Mature project which is looking at knowldge maturing and developing Personal and Organisational Learning and Management Environments.

It is a longish paper and covers such issues as:

• new ways of learning using Web 2.0 schools
• deschooling society
• workbased learning and the social shaping of work and technology
• organisational networks and communities of practice
• Personal Learning Emvironments
• the future of universties
• informal learning
• knowledge development and sharing

We were given a wide brief to look at what might happen up to 2025 and what developments we thought were likely and what were desireable. We have used the opportunity to think a little more freely than is often possible within the scope of traditional academic papers.

Annotate this paper

We would be very interested in your views on the ideas in this paper. We invite you to use Diigo tools to annotae the paper. If you have not used Diigo before for annotating and leaving comments here is a short introductory video. We invite you also to join the Diigo e-learning 2.0 group and to share your bookmarks through the group.

But we knw some people still prefer paper publications. So you can download an Open Office and a PDF version of the paper below.

workandlearning – PDF vesrion

workandlearning – Open Office version

Please don’t groan at yet another post on Personal Learning Environments. Well – I hope not becuase there are a few more in the pipeline. Why am I so focused. Besides my interest in how to change what I see as a grossly unfair and non-functional education system, because I am a partner on the EU funded Mature project which seeks to use PLEs to foster knowledge maturation.And I am using this blog as a jotting pad for confused ideas!

The problem with much of the debate for me, is that it is focused on hwo we use PLEs in education – or more narrowly in higher education. As such it is about replacing VLEs, letting go of control, providing services etc. Indeed we spend much of our time defining PLEs by what they are not! But what about those not in education – or at least those for whom formal learning is a episodic event? And what about using PLEs in the workplace? There has been very little dicussion around these issues and yet I think this may be where the real power of PLEs lies. Of couse everyone has their own PLE – if we take the widest sense of an enevironment in which we learn and if we accept that all working environments foster or constrain learning to a different extent. So one issue is simply how to design learning conducive working environments. But in a study we have undertaken for the Mature project (not yet available) we found that individuals have highly idiosyncratic ways of developing, managing and sharing knowledge, ranging from post-it notes and carrier bags to PDAs and voice recorders. On the one hand they are concious of their need for information and knowledge, on the other hand spend little time considering just how they meet such a need. And of course ICT comfidence and competence varies greatly.

We face a number of challenges in introducing PLEs for these knowledge rich workers. To what extent do we want to challenge the personal strategies people already have – especially if they are working for them? How can PLE tools be made to integrate within the working environment? At a more funadamental level what are these tools? What added value will they produce?

Yes – we can develop a range of services – calenders, access to research and resources and can provide these in flexible and multiple formats. But services alone do not mean learning. Much of the present learning is informal and much comes out of involvement in multiple networks – both organisational and personal. How can we build on the power of networks to enhance learning?

What is necessary for learning to take place? In a recent skype channel chat Jenny Hughes suggested that learning depends on readiness, preparedness and motivation. Readiness, she said, is about prerequisite skills and knowledge and physical and intellectual and emotional state or stage of development; preparedness is about having the time, the technology, the environment etc. and motivation is will or desire. If there are opportunties for informal learning in everyday work, then a PLE can assist in the preparedness for learning but can do little for readiness for motivation.

To be continued……

Jenny Hughes has been undertaking the thankless task of trying to edit (or more to rewrite) an article of mine on Personal Learning Environments as part of a handbook for teachers for the Taccle project.

I am intrigued by her reference ot the orgins of the words ‘curriculum’ and ‘learning’ in this excerpt from the draft:

“Traditionally, knowledge has been conceived of something possed by ‘experts’ . The formal education curriculum is based on the idea that learning can be neatly and conveniently divided into subject areas which in turn are based on traditional university disciplines.  The people who have the knowledge (the teachers) are accorded higher status than those that do not (the learners) and although all good teachers maintain that they learn a lot from their pupils, the passage of information is conceived as being one-way. There are desgnated places (schools) where learning officially takes place, where learning is tested and  which control access to the next stage or level of learning

The new technologies have challenged this status quo.  The explosion of freely available sources of information has increased the range of knowledge available to people and has made it accessible when and where they want it, in bite sized chunks that do not necessarily form a coherent subject discipline.

We are moving from the idea of knowledge being developed and controlled by experts to collaborative knowledge construction which can be facilitated by the use of social software, as we describe above. Even more importantly, we are starting to rethink what qualifies as ‘knowledge’.  Instead of the ‘curriculum’ being defined by experts, communities of people interested in the same things – or even just by being part of a community – are acting as a curriculum.

Interestingly, the word curriculum comes from the latin ‘currere’, which means to run or race and ‘curriculum’ was a race or racecourse. It is easy to see how this was adopted to describe a learning course which had a starting point, travelled along a straight route and reached a finishing point with competitors battling with each other to finish first or to be the best.

Maybe for the first time learning has stopped being a race course. Conversely ‘to learn’ originally meant ‘to find and follow a track’  and this seems to sum up rather well the current shift in emphasis from formal curriculum to informal learning.

This changing model requires not only different approaches but different technologies and implicit is the change from an institutional approach to learning to a more learner centred approach.”

I accepted an invitation to do a keynote presentation at a conference on Web 2.0 at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal on October 10th. What I dinn’t realise is that they wanted me to write a paper. I am not so keen on formal papers these days – I far prefer multimedia but I finally got down to it. I greatly enjoyed readng up for he paper and quite enjoyed writing it – though am frustrated at all the things I did not say. And I still find the academic text format a bit stifling. Oh – and I hated doing the referencing (though that is my fault – I should have done it as I wrote). Anyway here is the paper. I am trying to out in scribd to see if this makes sense as a way of blogging a paper.

If you prefer you can download the paper here – portplesfin

A quick update on developments with Freefolio.

Regular readers may remember that Freefolio is a ‘social’ eportfolio being developed by Pontydysgu and our partners, Raycom. Freefolio is based on WordPress MU and includes a serie sof plug ins for gorup management, structured blogging, aggregation and so on. Why a ‘social’ e-Portfolio. Becuase our primary aim is to support learning and we see learning as a social process.

the development of Freefolio is currently beings upported by Kent and Medway Connexions service.

This week we demoed the latest release whcih includes numerous improvements over the previous version. These include amongst others:

1. Easier account creation
2. Greatly simplified and redesigned backend user area
3. Fully customisable dashboard
4. Greater user controlled widgets
5. Full multi media integration through media centre
6. Bringing together of all personal data – profile, settings and CV on one tab
7. Provision of many templates for user choice – some of which allow considerable customisation
8. Replacement of spam karma by less intrusive spam filter
9. Greater code modularization allowing easier future updating and customisation.
10. Full integration of structured blogging templates in wordpress ‘write’ section.

We are working on the group functionality and are planning a presentation module plug in.

In the past we have provided access to a demonstration site for those interested in Freefolio. our first site got hacked down by robots registering accounts. We changed the account creation system to block bots, but then encountered probelms with real (well, brainless but human) registering accounts to spam their wares. Weare planning a new demo site with the new release as soon as we have found someone to moderate the site.

In the meantime if you would like to know more just email me.

Last week I undertook two days of interviews with staff from a large educational service company in the UK. The interviews formed part of a series of enthnographic studies being undertaken by the Mature project to look at how information and knowledge are developed within organisations. Obviously communciation is a key part of this and we talked to workers at all levels of the organisation how they communictaed, about what and with who.

I suppose I should not have been surprised by the results but I was. The main means of communication is email. Everone used email on a daily basis for communciating about all kinds of things – including when soemone brought cake into a district office. There appeared to be no policy on what should be communicated – it being left up to individuals to decide what should be emailed to who. And although most epople said they found i quite hard keeping up with the volume of emails all were adamant that it was critical to their work.

I guess it would be possible to move a lot of this traffic to another platform – an intranet or wiki – although there is a temptation not to tinker with soemthing which is not broken. But n or discussions on learning platforms, PLEs and the rest, I think we have fogotten how important email is to peoples’ informal learning and work.

Yesterday I read “Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments” by Fridolin Wild, Felix Mödritscher and Steinn Sigurdarson, who are working on the EU funded iCamp project. Thi is interesting stuff.
At the core of their arguement is the idea that “by 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 look at AI and adaptive approaches to learning environments.

“Adaptive (educational) hypermedia technologies all differ”, they say, but “they share one characteristic: they deal primarily with the navigation through content, i.e. the represented domain specific knowledge. Information processing and knowledge construction activities are not in the focus of these approaches. Consequently, they do not treat environments as learning outcomes and they cannot support learning environment design.”

Their approach goes beyond personalisation.

“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’). ”

They go on to explain a set of tools beng piloted by the iCamp project:

“In this section we describe the development of a technological framework enabling learners to build up their own personal learning environments by composing web-based tools into a single user experience, get involved in collaborative activities, share their designs with peers (for ‘best practice’ or ‘best of breed’ emergence), and adapt their designs to reflect their experience of the learning process. This framework is meant to be a generic platform for end-user development of personal learning environments taking into account the paradigm shift from expert-driven personalisation of learning to a design for emergence method for building a personal learning environment.”

The tools and platform they have developed are based on a learner interaction scripting language (LISL) leading to a Mash-UP Personal Learning Environment (MUPPLE). I do not fully understand how the platform works (does it require users to understand the scripting language?) but it appears to be based on users describing a set of activities they wish to undertake. These activities then allow them to access a set of tools to undertake those activities. The focus on activities rather than tasks seems to me interesting.

I very much like the idea that the learning platform is seen as an outcome of learning and think the approach has great potential. I woudl be interested to hear what others think of the approach. I hope to get a look at the platform and will report back.

I am greatly intrigued by Martin Weller’s presentation on SocialLearn yesterday. One of the advantages of Elluminate is it allows you to watch a recording of the presentation afterwards, although it is very frustrating not being able ot take part in the rolling chat channel. SocialLearn is a UK Open University project. According to the SocialLearn blog: “Some learners will be happy running 20 web apps [for their Personal Laerning Environment], while others will want to access this ecosystem via a coherent web interface. Currently one would do this via iGoogle, Netvibes, Facebook etc, if the apps have widgets in these different walled gardens.

In SocialLearn, we aim to move beyond web-feed based interoperability and visual clustering of apps on the webtop, with SL-aware apps communicating via the API, so that the learner’s profile can track and intelligently manage the flow of information and events to support their activity.”

This seems a great approach and I particularly liked Martin’s demo of their alpha software. two things stood out for me – the focus on people as a recommender for resources, thus allowing Open Educational Resouces to be accessed in context. Secondly the idea of supporting micro and episodic learning.

I do have concerns. The OU appears to be positioning the project as an experiment in exploring new business models in a world of competition by multiple learning providers. I am not sure that this is the ideal starting point but I suppose innovation is driven by many concerns and motivations!

When I watched the presentation last night I was also not happy with another of the core assumations behind the project – namely that “there is a major shift in society and education driven by the possibilities new technology create for creating and sharing content and social networking.” This seemed to me too technology centerd. But looking at it again in the cold light of a Friday morning the emphasis on the possibilities of new technology seems right. What then becomes interesting is that if such possibilities exist and if we assume that technology can be socially shaped, how do we use such possibilities in facilitating learning.

And in that respect, the SocialLearn project looks to be a very important initiative.

I think I might have posted this some time ago. But it is worth looking at agin in teh context of developing Personal Learning Environments. I would argue that a central tole for a PLE is for knowledge development and sharing and the knowledge development involves different processes. Jenny Hughes has produced an analysis of different forms of knowledge based on the Welsh language. Whilst English has few words to differentiate knowledge, in Welsh there are at least six different terms for knowledge processes and six different terms for different types of knowledge, each with their own distinct meaning.
The general word for knowledge in Welsh – the translation from the English word knowledge is Gwybodaeth. Even this is not an exact translation. Gwybodaeth means something like ‘knowing-ness’, rather than knowledge.

However, the word Gwybodaeth – or knowing-ness comes in different forms defining different types of knowledge:

1. Cynnull (gwybodaeth) – to gather knowledge (as in acquisition) ‘along life’s way’
2. Cynhaeaf (gwybodaeth) – to harvest (purposefully) knowledge– or set up systems for harnessing knowledge or organise knowledge
3. Cymrodedd (gwybodaeth) – to compromise what you know to accommodate the unknown
4. Cynnau (gwybodaeth) – to light or kindle knowledge (in someone else) – can also be used to ‘share knowledge’ but implicit is that it is an active process not simply an exchange of information, which is an entirely different concept.
5. Cynllunplas (gwybodaeth) – to design (new) knowledge, paradigm shift
6. Cynyddu (gwybodaeth) – to increase or grow (existing) knowledge

I would argue that a PLE should support in some ways all of these different forms of knowing-ness and that such a list represents a useful starting point in defining what we want a PLE to be able to do.