It’s the last day of the summer holidays.

On Sunday I am traveling to Hamburg for the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER). I am not a great fan of conferences – al least the formal part. I have long campaigned for the ‘flipped conference’. All too often conferences just consist of researchers reading out their bullet points from their slides. Their is little chance to interrogate the ideas, less so to have a proper discussion about the work they are presenting. All too often presentations overrun with it being accepted that the ten or so minutes scheduled for discussion at the end of three or four presentations will be eaten up. And it is interesting that people still hark back to the Personal Learning environment conferences where we did at least try to do things differently. In reality the best bit of the conferences are usually in the informal discussions which take place outside the official sessions.

Having said that I like the ECER conferences. One strength is the priority given to emerging researchers. Another is the international focus for ECER, not just in terms of attracting delegates from all over the world, but in stressing that presentation should focus on at east the European dimension of the research. A third advantage of ECER is that it covers many different areas of education through the 31 or so networks which organise the programme. This year, I am in a privileged position as I have been commissioned by the European Educational Research Association to make a series of short videos, interviewing the network conveners. The idea is that the videos provide a quick and informative way of people understanding the focus of the networks and the activities they are undertaking, including the increasing number of what EERA call ‘season schools’ (formerly summer schools but the changed nomenclature reflecting the fact that most take place outside the summer time). This week we are aiming to record 21 videos. It will be hard work but a lot of fun and for me a great learning opportunity.

Of course, one of the attractions of conferences is the chance to meet up with old colleagues and friends. I will be in Hamburg all week. If you would like to meet up just drop me a line.

As regular readers of this blog will know, Pontydysgu were members of a consortium in a project called EmployID, funded by the European Commission. The project focused on changing work identities in Public Employment services and how technology could be used to support Continuing Professional Development, including both formal learning and informal learning.

All too often such project produce a series of fairly unintelligible reports before they face away. We were determined not to replicate this pattern. Instead of producing a  series of annual reports for the EU based on different project work packages, for three years of the project we produced an an unified annual report in the form of an ebook.

And the EmployId Consultancy Network , formed out of the project has now produced a short book, designed for individuals and organisations interested in organisational transformations, changing identities and learning.

The EmployId Consultancy Network is a network of researchers, practitioners and trainers offering tailored services for solutions around facilitating staff development with the focus on professional identity transformation (among them are myself, Luis Manuel Artiles Martinez, Pablo Franzolini, Deirdre Hughes, Christine Kunzmann, John Marsh, Andreas P. Schmidt, Jordi Fernández Vélez, Ranko Markus, Karin Trier, Katarina Ćurković and Adrijana Derossi).

This is what the book is about:

The world of work is undergoing fundamental transformations.

For example, nurses have mostly chosen their job because they want to care for their patients, but their work now involves, to a large degree, computer-based documentation and quality assurance measures. Practitioners in public employment services turn from administrating unemployment benefits into coaches for their clients. And engineers need to make sense of large scale sensor data and assess the opportunities of artificial intelligence techniques for their companies’ future services.We see technological developments such as digitization and automation in an ever increasing number of sectors and intensity.

Are you embracing and shaping the change or are you being driven by it?

Companies and public sector organisations have to reshape their value creation processes and guide their employees to new job roles, creating an uncertain outlook. Ask yourself are you embracing and shaping change, or are you being driven by it? The ability to utilise modern technologies and methods is simply scratching the surface. Overcoming resistance to change, stressful conflicts, and lack of openness are major road blocks. We also need to look at a deeper level of learning. Employees need to rethink their job roles, their relationship to others, and what a successful working environment means to them.

Employees and Leaders need to take new approaches to match the new responsibilities

This indicates the importance of the professional identity of individuals and occupational groups. Employees are often not given opportunities to engage in reflective learning conversations. There is a need for workers to consider the emotional aspects of their work and identity. It is important that they also acquire the skills needed to work effectively with others to move from a problem focus to a solution focus and help each other in their learning process.

In this short book, we look at strategies to empower and shape change, including the role of technology and identity transformation for learning in the workplace.The contents of this book follow a deliberate path focusing on contemporary themes. It is aimed at practitioners, managers, researchers and policymakers.

You can download a free PDF copy of the book here. Or you can order the paperback version on Amazon for Euro 14.40.

I am supposed to be adding resources on the Circular Economy for a new webs site for adult educators which we are helping develop. But as happens too often with digital media I got distracted by Twitter. It was a tweet from Dave White which did it. N was not quite sure what he was going on about but Dave White is always worth listening to.

Lots of discussion in our #teachcomUAL session again this week – thanks to @mattlingard. I’ll post the slides in the next couple of days.

The recording of the session: eu.bbcollab.com/recording/810f…

Temp location for the Digital Fieldwork activities is here: daveowhite.com/digifield1/ twitter.com/daveowhite/sta…

I followed the links and ending up on the ‘temp location’ web site.   And very interesting it is too. The Digital Creative Attributes framework developed at the University of the Arts London is designed to connecting high-level aspirations through to practical activity. These, Dave says,   are an extension of the Creative Attributes Framework at the UAL which lays out nine key attribute areas in three groups. The Digital Creative Attributes Framework (‘D-CAF’) is a framework which provides a shared language for staff, students and the creative industries and, amongst other things, can be used to articulate current curriculum in digital-practice terms.

The DCAF is released under  a Creative Commons licence and says Dave “It gives a good insight into the digital practices which underpin creative working and as such is relevant to anyone taking a creative approach to teaching and learning.”

For a tender I wrote earlier thiss summer I was asked to comment on a series of challenges and issues related to the use of ICT in education. I think the challenges and issues were well framed. This is a draft of what I wrote.

Fast changing and developing Information and Communication Technologies offer great opportunities for education but also considerable challenges. How can educational policies and practices be developed to utilise the potentials of ICT and modernize education whilst safeguarding students, promoting inclusion and lifelong learning and ensuring equal opportunities? What are the implications for the design of educational institutions, teacher education and curriculum development? What are the ethical implications of the use of ICTs in education?

ICT in Education policy review and development

The development and implementation of policies for using ICT in education needs to be an ongoing and continuous process, incorporating monitoring and review. It also has to link policy to practice. A technology centred approach is not enough alone. More important perhaps, is a focus on developing and implementing new pedagogies for the use of ICTs. Policy processes have to incorporate not only technology companies but educational experts and practitioners.

The issue of the digital divide and the subsequent risk of digital exclusion remains a barrier to ensuring equity and equality in access to technologies. Policies have to ensure infrastructures are fit for purpose if the potential of technology to open up and extend learning is to be achieved. There are major issues as to how to scale up project driven and pilot programmes to widespread adoption and in how to negotiate access to commercial hardware and software and infrastructure for schools from vendors.

Policy has to be developed to safeguard students but at the same time encourage their creative use of ICTs. Education policies also have to address the issues of privacy, bullying and digital literacy, particularly understanding the veracity and reliability of data sources. Further issues include privacy and data ownership. Policy development needs to consider ethical concerns in using not only educational technologies but big data and social networks

Teacher competences and professional development in ICT

While early initial programmes focused on training teachers in how to use ICT, there is an increasing focus on their confidence and competence in the use of ICT for teaching and learning in the classroom. Rather than ICT being seen as a subject in itself, this new focus is on the use of technology for learning across the curriculum. Programmes of initial teacher training need to be updated to reflect these priorities. In addition, there is a need for extensive programmes of continuing professional development to ensure all teacher are confident and competent in using ICT for teaching and learning. New models of professional development are required to overcome the resource limitations of traditional course based programmes.

The ICT Competence Framework for Teachers provides a basis for developing initial and continuing teacher training programmes but requires ongoing updating to reflect changes in the way technologies are being used for learning and changing understandings of digital competence. The development and sharing of learning materials based on the Framework can help in this process.

Mobile learning and frontier technology

There are at any time a plethora of innovations and emerging developments in technology which have the potential for impacting on education, both in terms of curriculum and skills demands but also in their potential for teaching and learning. At the same time, education itself has a tendency towards a hype cycle, with prominence for particular technologies and approaches rising and fading.

Emerging innovations on the horizon at present include the use of Big Data for Learning Analytics in education and the use of Artificial Intelligence for Personalised Learning. The development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) continue to proliferate. There is a renewed interest in the move from Virtual Learning Environments to Personal Learning Environments and Personal Learning Networks.

Mobile learning seeks to build on personal access to powerful and increasingly cheap Smart Phones to allow access to educational resources and support – in the form of both AI and people – in different educational contents in the school, in the workplace and in the community. However, the adoption of mobile learning has been held back by concerns over equal access to mobiles, their potential disruption in the classroom, privacy, online safety and bullying and the lack of new pedagogic approaches to mobile learning.

The greatest potential of many of these technologies may be for informal and non formal learning, raising the challenge of how to bring together informal and formal learning and to recognise the learning which occurs outside the classroom.

The development and sharing of foresight studies can help in developing awareness and understanding of the possible potential of new technologies as well as their implications for digital literacies and curriculum development. Better sharing of findings and practices in pilot projects would ease their development and adoption.

Once more there is a challenge in how to recognise best practice and move from pilot projects to widespread adoption and how to ensure the sustainability of such pilot initiatives.

Finally, there needs to be a continuous focus on ethical issues and in particular how to ensure that the adoption of emerging technologies support and enhances, rather than hinders, movements towards gender equality.

Open Educational Resources (OER);

There has been considerable progress in the development and adoption of Open Education Resources in many countries and cultures. This has been to a large extent based on awareness raising around potentials and important practices at local, national and international level, initiatives which need to continue and be deepened. Never the less, there remain barriers to be overcome. These include how to measure and recognise the quality of OERs, the development of interoperable repositories, how to ensure the discoverability of OERs, and the localization of different OERs including in minority languages.

While progress has been made, policy developments remain variable in different countries. There remains an issue in ensuring teachers understandings of the discovery, potential and use of OERS and importantly how to themselves develop and share OERs. This requires the incorporation of OER use and development in both initial and continuing professional development for teachers.

Finally, there is a growing movement from OERs towards Open Educational Practices, a movement which will be important in developing inclusion, equity and equal opportunities in education.

ICT in education for Persons with Disabilities

 Adaptive technologies have the potential to provide inclusive, accessible and affordable access to information and knowledge and to support the participation of Persons with Disabilities in lifelong learning opportunities.

Assistive, or adaptive, technology has undergone a revolution in recent years. There is a wide range of established commercial and free and open source software products available (such as screen readers, on-screen keyboards and spelling aids), as well as in-built accessibility features in computers and programs.

More people use mobile and portable devices with assistive apps. One significant benefit of ICTs is the provision of a voice for those who are unable to speak themselves. Apps for tablet devices for example that use scanning and a touch screen interface can now provide this at a fraction of the cost of some of the more complex and advanced hardware technologies.

Most countries have moved towards including young people with Special Educational Needs within mainstream educational provision. The use of technology for learning can allow differentiated provision of learning materials, with students able to work at a different pace and using different resources within the classroom.

Regardless of these potentials there is a need to ensure that institutional policies include the needs of students with disabilities and that staff have time to properly engage with these and to provide staff awareness and training activities. Alternative formats for learning materials may be required and the adoption of OERs can help in this process.

Developing digital skills

The importance of digital skills is increasingly recognised as important for future employability. This includes both the skills to use digital technologies but also their use in vocational and occupational contexts. Discussions over the future of work, based largely on the growing applications of AI and robots, suggest future jobs will require higher level skills including in digital technologies. This will require changes in a wide range of curricula. Mapping of changing needs for digital skills provide a reference point for such development. Some countries are already including coding and computational thinking in primary schools: a trend which is likely to spread but once more requiring professional development for teachers. The rapid development of technology is also leading to changes in understandings of digital skills. Reference Frameworks are important in providing a base line for curriculum development and teacher training but require updating to reflect such new understandings.

It is important that digital skill development is not reduced to an employability agenda. Instead it needs to include the use of such skills for providing a decent life within society and community and to equip young people with the skills and understanding of the appropriate use of technology within their social relations and their life course.  Yet again, such skills and understanding require continuing considerations of ethical issues and of how digital skills can advance gender equality.

Good presentation at Open Education Global Conference, April 24th, 2018 – based on a paper by Catherine Cronin & Iain MacLaren (2018), Open Praxis, 10(2). They define Open Educational Practices (OEP) as the Use/reuse/creation of OER and collaborative, pedagogical practices employing social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, and empowerment of learners. Open Educational Practices.

Catherine Cronin has also posted References and Links from the presentation in an open Google document.

According to OER Commons…

“The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the human right to access high-quality education. The Open Education Movement is not just about cost savings and easy access to openly licensed content; it’s about participation and co-creation.”

Thsi presentation by Lorna Cambell from her keynote at the FLOSS UK Spring Conference provides a great overview of the Open Education landscape. A transcript of her speech is available on her blog.

I think I have written several times before about the problems with conferences. Too many boring sessions with short presentations featuring long lists of bullet points in PowerPoint. At best time for a couple of questions before the next speaker. Inadequate review processes as all conferences want to get as many delegates as they can. Too expensive, thus excluding emerging researchers, but still with enough funding for gala dinners for those senior enough to get a travel grant.

And of course, we all say how the informal discussion outside the conference room is the best part but we never think about why that might be.

But things are slowly changing. Just as smaller, better organised niche music festivals have slowly emerged alongside the mega events, so too are new conferences being established which try at least to promote discourse and to break the traditional mould.

One of the best I have attended recently is the Crossing Boundaries conferences – held three years ago in Bremen in Germany and last year in Rostock.

The “Crossing Boundaries in Vocational Education and Training” Conference, the organisers say is guided by the following ten principles:

• being active: all participants are presenters, therefore you cannot participate without presenting
• interdisciplinarity: all contributions around work and learning are welcome
• keynote speakers: each day will be opened with at least one keynote
• open: no conference fee
• selection: you submit to the conference organizer a short research paper (500-1000 words) which will undergo a review process
• familarity: one evening is reserved to catch up with old friends and meet new ones in a relaxed atmosphere
• small size: the conference is limited to 80 participants
• time: the presentation time is 20 minutes (maximum) with additional 10 minutes time for discussion (minimum); sessions are chaired
• proceedings: after acceptance all participants contribute with their research paper (up to 2000 words) to the conference proceedings which will be available on the first day of the conference in printed version and later in digital (with download option e.g. on ResearchGate)
• special edition: some participants will be invited to contribute with an extended research paper (up to 5000 words) to a special edition which will be published in IJRVET International Journal for Research in Vocational Education and Training

The 2019 Conference is being held in Valencia, Spain. Abstracts are due in by 31 May this year. See you there?

I like the open leadership map white paper released by the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla say:

Open Leadership is the “how” of our work. It’s how we accomplish our work in communities, organizations, and projects. open leadership encompases the processes and resources we use to support Internet health for everyone’s benefit.

Open leaders “work open.” They work collaboratively, sharing the ownership of ideas, resources, and outcomes with contributors, while building powerful, diverse communities to support and direct projects and organizations. They also set the conditions for others to do the same, ensuring accountability, equity, and transparency in a project and its community.

Unlike the now familiar competency frameworks Mozilla poses their map as a process, based on design, build and empowerment.

This Open Leadership Map suggests areas of focus you can concentrate on during your open leadership journey to achieve these goals. To use the map, consider your objective(s) and look at the principles, actions, and embedded skills that might best help you reach your goals.

Mozilla is presently is asking for peoples’ opinions and ideas about the map.

Last November I was invited to give a presentation at a conference “Are we lost in online space?” organised by in Belgrade.

As the report on the conference web site says, the conference brought together 48 participants, most from east Europe, and 6 experts in the field of online learning. Participants had the opportunity to learn, experience and discuss about digital pedagogy, personal learning environment, online counseling for youth at risk, the possibility to educate youth workers in the online context, the ability of young people to use online tools when they are used for educational purposes, using games with young people, the potentials of using the virtual reality packages in youth work.

The web site also has video of all the presentations. I particularly liked the presentation on How to approach young people at risk to use the opportunities of online counseling by Anni Marquard, from the Centre for Digital Youth Care, Denmark and on Using games & gaming culture for educational purposes by Uroš Antić from Serbia)

It was a lively conference with a wide range of different experiences and views and some great participatory workshops and activities. It was apparent that at least from the countries represented in the conference, technology is a relatively new field in youth work, but also that many youth workers are ready to engage with young people through technology. However, tools and platforms such as Moodle seemed really not to support the pedagogy of youth work, nor to engage with young people. Youth work is more about informal learning – and ed-tech has tended to focus on formal learning.

There was a quick straw poll at the end of the conference on whether or not we were (still’ lost in online space. Participants were divided – some lost, some not and some not sure!

The OER18 Conference takes place in Bristol, UK on 18 – 19 April 2018. OER18 is the 9th annual conference for Open Education research, practice and policy. The final keynote has now been announced: Dr Momodou Sallah is Reader in Globalisation and Global Youth Work at the Social Work, Youth and Community Division, De Montfort University.  More about the conference: http://go.alt.ac.uk/2DmsPPu