I am intrigued by this abstract is for a Symposium that will be presented at ALT-C 2011 by Frances Bell, Cristina da Costa, Josie Fraser, Richard Hall and Helen Keegan and is published on Frances Bell’s blog. I am reproducing it in full below.

This symposium will examine the paradoxes of giving and receiving online in education in a changing economic climate.  Each of the panelists will briefly address topic areas within the symposium theme, followed by an opportunity for present and at distance audiences to contribute, concluding with a 25 minute plenary discussion.

Symposium delegates will be provoked to reconsider the costs of participation online by paid and unpaid participants in ‘open’ discussion and sharing of resources.

Open Educational Resources exist within communities that create, use and sustain them (Downes 2007). When ‘communities’ in Higher Education break down due to redundancy and casualisation of labour what happens to OERs? Are they sustained? Can they reach out to other contexts?

All areas of education, including the school sector, currently face significant financial challenges and uncertainties. Institutions are increasingly reviewing the provision of devices and services, and looking at learner owned devices and commercially owned ‘free’ cloud-based services. What is the real price of an education system supported and transformed by embedded learning technologies?

Ownership in the age of openness calls for clarity about mutual expectations between learners, communities and ourselves. Ideas and content are shared easily through open platforms, and yet attributions can be masked in the flow of dissemination: does credit always go where it is due?

Openness in the production, sharing and reuse of education/resources is meaningless in the face of neoliberalism. Where coercive competition forms a treadmill for the production of value, openness/OERs are commodified. Control of the educational means of production determines power to frame how open are the relations for the production or consumption of educational goods or services, in order to realise value. The totality of this need, elicited by the state for capital, rather than the rights of feepayers, parents, communities or academics, shapes how human values like openness are revealed and enabled within HE.

Scarce research monies focus attention on impact factors, arguably stagnating practice. For publications, Open Access can increase wider societal impact but at the expense of career progression.We explore the tensions, paradoxes and professional costs on societal benefits, individual agency and academic progression.

Obviously this is a bit of a mash up proposal but it does raise a lot of questions. I think there is a tension between the idea of communities and institutions. Communities of practice, and for that matter the communities in which Open education Resources are being produced and shared, cross institutional boundaries. Furthermore the use of OERs may be within an institutional setting but may also be outside.

This again is reflected in recognition and reward structures. Whilst reward structures within institutions are based on either monetary compensation or in terms of progression, rewards within the community may reflect a wider understanding of recognition, especially respect or standing within that community. Does credit always go to who it should? Probably not, but this is taking a very individualistic view of research. Surely credit should be shared in the community rather than in the closed door offices of academic researchers.

Are OERs being commodified? Presumably the term “coercive competition” refers to the growing practice to require academics and researchers to publish their work as OERs. I don’t really understand what the authors mean in saying “The totality of this need, elicited by the state for capital, rather than the rights of feepayers, parents, communities or academics, shapes how human values like openness are revealed and enabled within HE.” Of course the idea of openness is being hijacked by institutions. But at the same time the movement towards openness is contradictory and I am not sure this is reflected in the abstract. Especially missing is a discussion of the nature of OERs in allowing reuse and modification and the impact this has on (commodified) relations of production and intellectual property. And at the same time, the spread of OERs is allowing new open forms of learning and knowledge production outside the confines of the institution. thus whilst the movement towards OERs may be becoming commodified the use of OERs is challenging traditional understandings of those very commodities.

I don’t think this reveals a paradox but a dialectical contradiction. Present schooling models of education are being found to be wanting. The discussion about open education is important in that it could provide an alternative to privatisation. The discussion over OERs forms an important part of this debate and to this extent the debate over this symposium is extremely interesting.

Following on yesterday’s blog post on MOOCs as a possible model for Open Education, here is another initiative taking a different approach. The Open Education Quality Initiative (OPAL) describes itself as “a flagship initiative being implemented by a group of organizations including UNESCO, EFQUEL and ICDE and includes representatives of leading institutions from within higher education and adult education.”

The OPAL website, inviting participation in an on-line consultative group says: “The initiative believes that although OER are high on the agenda of social and inclusion policies, their use in higher education and adult education has not reached a critical threshold. The focus has been placed on building access to digital content, while the challenge now is to support educational practices and to promote quality and innovation in teaching and learning.”

This theme is taken up by Ulf Daniel Ehlers in the introductory video above.  Ulf Daniel calls for a transformation in the approach to Open Educational Resources moving the focus in what he calls stage two of development from content to practice and goes on to outline the idea of an Open Educational Architecture.

Whilst seeming to be saying the right thing, this seems to me more of a policy lobby, than anything really impacting on practice. And the idea of OERs remains within the context of exiting institutions, rather than opening up education to a wider participant group. None the less, the focus on what Open Education might mean, and how educational institutions could engage with Open Education is a welcome addition to the debate.

The idea of Open Education has come a long way in the last two years. Massive Online Open Courses are becoming more common (with the announcement of the “mother of all MOOCs” on Change: Education, Learning and Technology exciting great interest in the edu-blogosphere), conferences and seminars being streamed online and Open Educational Resources have entered the mainstream.

What has been learned in this process?

Firstly the model of courses which are free to participants but charge for institutional enrollment and for certification appears to be gaining traction. How far this can go depends I guess on the extent that participation (and recording of work) becomes recognised as achievement. It will also depend on how much value universities and other institutions think they can gain (or stand to lose) through such a model.

Secondly most of these programmes are using all manner of social software and Open Source applications. There seems to be a growing practice of hanging programmes together around open webinars, with students using their own blogs or other social software for their personal work. One of the less successful experiments seems to be attempts to integrate VLEs, especially Moodle, within MOOCs. Participants are being encouraged to develop their own Personal Learning Environments as part of the process.

Thirdly such initiatives place great emphasis on peer support for learning, with a greater or lesser extent of formal learning support and formalization of networks. One greatly encouraging development is the blurring of the boundary between teachers and learners. Another is the involvement of people form different organisations in leading, facilitating or stewarding such programmes. Most stewards or facilitators are not being paid, although I suspect at present this is being accepted by institutions as a legitimate part of their work as researchers. Whatever, this is resulting in a weakening of institutional boundaries and the emergence of stronger communities of practice.

There also seems to be considerable pedagogic innovation, with a willingness to explore new ways of learning. Especially encouraging is the use of multi media, which although promised in so many formal elearning programmes, has seldom really happened.

Now comes the big question. Can the experience gained from the MOOCs be extended to provide a transferable and scalable model for Open Education.

I’ve already talked about the issue of recognition which I see not so much as a question of assessment but of social recognition of achievement. But there are other open issues. How do we deal with language barriers? More critically, most participants in the early MOOCs seem to be professionals, teachers and researchers already engaged in online learning or multi media and / or students. In other words, people with a fair degree of competence in communicating through on-line media. The model is based on a large degree of self motivation and is reliant on learners being able to manage both their own learning and able to develop their own support networks. This is a pretty big limitation.

I see two ways to deal with this. One is to provide more formal and institutional support through participation in MOOCs becoming part of courses on which learners are already enrolled and their host institution providing support. This idea is already being suggested for the Change: Education, Learning and Technology MOOC. The second is through developing more fomalised individual and group mentoring and support systems. At the moment, we are tending to focus on presenters as the key people in facilitating the online programmes. But such a second layer of mentors could play the critical role, and providing such mentoring could be a key part of Continuing Professional Development for teachers and trainers. In other words, a win, win situation.

This is proposal submitted by Andrew Ravenscroft, Graham Attwell, David Blagbrough and Dirk Stieglitz for the PLE2011 conference in Southampton has been accepted. We are going to have a lot of fun. And remember you can join us too. Whilst paper submissions are closed you can still submit proposals for posters pecha keucha or the media competition until June 11th.

Introduction: Designing personalized new media spaces to support transformational and emancipatory learning

Relatively recent research into, and definitions of, personalised learning environments (e.g. van Harmelen, 2008) have proposed new technological configurations or learning design patterns. These typically harmonise individual learner agency and initiative with a developing ecology of open web services and tools. This is the PLEs from an ‘alternative learning technology perspective’. Another and complementary way to view personalisation, that has a history beyond relatively recent technological developments, is to view ‘personlisation as practice’. In this sense, personalisation is rooted in the ‘deep’ matching and development of learners interests, experiences and motivations with their chosen informal or formal learning trajectories, that may be realized through personalised technologies. This is a psycho-social approach to personalisaton and learning technology design and use, that conceives of learning as something that grows out from the learner, rather than something that is acquired from some pre-structured, ‘external’ and ‘imposed’ curricula.

This position is particularly important when we are attempting to find technology-enabled ways to engage, retain and support the learning of disadvantaged people who are excluded, or at risk of exclusion, from traditional learning paths and trajectories. Arguably, this problem is most severe in the burgeoning numbers of NEETs (Not in Education Employment and Training) throughout the UK and Europe. Addressing the needs of these growing communities requires new and radical approaches to learning, learning design and technology-enabled practice. One foundation for a radical and technology-enabled pedagogy for disadvantaged groups is the groundbreaking work of Paulo Freire (1970).

Applying Friere to PLE design: Technical reformulation of ciphers

In Paulo Freire’s seminal work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (Freire, 1970), he emphasized the importance of critical engagement in and analysis of broader societal ‘cycles’ and their effects. One way to do this is through using lived culture, and praxis (action that is informed by values) as the foundational elements for developing circles that promote transformational learning. These ideas have recently been taken up within the non hierarchical, shared, creative, inclusive, safe and supported spaces called “ciphers” – which have emerged from the urban youth culture particularly around hip hop music (Wiliams, 2009).

We are currently using this cipher concept as a metaphor for designing and developing RadioActive, a hybrid of internet-radio and augmented social media platform to support the transformational learning of disadvantaged young people.

The RadioActive pilot

This presentation will describe the design, piloting and evaluation of RadioActive with NEETs in the London Borough of Hackney. The radio-social media platform is being co-designed with these NEETs and their support actors (such as youth workers and parents) in Hackney (in London). A key aspect is that the ‘going live’ aspect acts as a catalyst for community engagement and cohesion, linked to related social media activity. Put simply, the internet-radio gives a presence, real-time narrative and an energy that drives participation, interaction and content creation.

This is an innovative and participative broadcasting model that combines Open Source or easily affordable technology to create ‘the communities’ radio platform. This deliberately fuses, inspired by Web 2.0 trends, traditional distinctions between broadcaster/program planner and listener/consumer. The holistic design concept is an edutainment platform and hard to reach community combined, via the cipher approach, into a connected ‘live entity’ rather than the community being seen as a separate audience that is broadcast to.

The central idea is that this radio cipher provides the means to initially engage and retain NEETs, who can then be exposed to and participate in informal learning activities that lead to the development of skills and competencies that prepare them for Further Education or work. They develop both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills through RadioActive. The softer ones relate to personal expression, the development of self-confidence and self-esteem, and the development of collaborative working skills. The harder ones involve the development of concrete digital literacy, media production, communication and organizational skills, that can exploited in other education or employment related activities. Similarly, their artefacts and competencies are recorded (e.g. in an eportfolio) or made public (e.g on the web) in ways that can be presented to potential Educators or Employers.

The proposed conference activities

This contribution will follow the collaborative and praxis driven spirit of this project and the PLE conference, through incorporating 2 related activities:
1. A presentation linked to the archive of the pilot radio show;
2. Mashup madness or a community in harmony? Live RadioActive show and DJ set during a social event at the conference, with RadioActive DJ’s mixing a set based on 1 or 2 favorite songs suggested by each delegate.

References

Friere, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Continuum Publishing.

Van Harmelen, H., Design trajectories: four experiments in PLE implementation, Interactive Learning Environments, 1744-5191, Volume 16, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 35 – 46.

Wiliams, D. (2009). The critical cultural cypher: Remaking Paulo Frieire’s cultural circles using Hip Hp culture. International, Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 2, 1, pp 1-29.

I was talking with Cristina Costa this morning about some of our ideas for the Radioactive project (more to come on this soon) and she asked me if I have read anything by Myles Horton. To my regret I have not and intend to remedy that later this week. In the meantime here is a short video about Myles Horton and his work and an excerpt from Wikipedia:

“A poor white man from Savannah in West Tennessee, Horton’s social and political views were strongly influenced by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, under whom he studied at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Along with educator Don West and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski of New Orleans, Horton founded the Highlander Folk School (now Highlander Research and Education Center) in his native Tennessee in 1932. He remained its director until 1973, traveling with it to reorganize in Knoxville after the state shut it down in 1961.

Horton and West had both traveled to Denmark to study its folk schools, centers for adult education and community empowerment. The resulting school in Monteagle, Tennessee was based on a concept originating in Denmark: “that an oppressed people collectively hold strategies for liberation that are lost to its individuals . . . The Highlander School had been a haven for the South’s handful of functional radicals during the thirties and the essential alma mater for the leaders of the CIO‘s fledgling southern organizing drives.” (McWhorter) The school was created to educate and empower adults for social change.

In their 1985 documentary You Got to Move, Lucy Massie Phenix and Veronica Selver prominently featured Horton and the Highlander School. Horton also inspired the founding of the Myles Horton Organization at the University of Tennessee in 1986. The group organized numerous protests and events in the Chattanooga, Tennessee area, including demonstrations to counter the Ku Klux Klan, and the construction of a shantytown on campus to encourage the university to divest from South Africa.”

Steve Wheeler has written an interesting bog post, which deserves unpacking and discussing.

Steve says:

Blended learning (in the established, traditional sense) means a mix of learning activities that involved students learning both in the classroom, and at a distance from the classroom, usually mediated through technology. I am claiming that this type of blended learning – in concept at least – is now outmoded because the boundaries between local and remote have now been substantially blurred.

I think I would largely agree with him although I am not so sure it is due to the blurring of the boundary between local and remote. Reading older papers on technology enhanced learning, there was great emphasis placed on the divide between synchronous and asynchronous communication and how to provide a proper ‘mix’ of technologies facilatating such modes. Today we flip between different modes without thinking about it. Take Skype – if I text someone they may reply straight away or may reply the next day. I may have a series of short episodic conversations with a colleague throughout the day. I may switch from text to audio or video for parts of these conversations. They may be one to one or we may invite others to participants for particular parts of the conversation. Instead of a divide between synchronous or asynchronous communication, tools now support multi modal communication and multi modal learning.

Steve goes on to say:

The new blend is to blur formal and informal learning

Of this I am less convinced. I am in a few problems here because I have often written myself about informal learning. But in truth I am unconvinced of the value of the concept. Indeed there is little agreement even on what the terms formal, informal and non-formal learning mean. If you are interested in this debate there is an excellent literature review by Colley, Hodkinson and Malcom who explore different definitions and uses of the terms. I have tended to use the idea of informal learning in two ways – to refer to learning which takes place outside the formal education system or to learning which takes place in the absence of formal teaching. The problem with the first use of the term is that it refers only to what it is not, rather than to what it is. And in the case of the second, it tends to ignore the influence of what Vykotsly called a More Knowledgeable Other. The More Knowledgeable Other is anyone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner, particularly in regards to a specific task, concept or process – a friend, a peer, a colleague, who can support the scaffolding of  learning. Technology is playing a significant role in blurring boundaries here. If I read Steve Wheeler’s article, think about it and write my own ideas then surely I am learning, and in this case Steve is playing the part of the More Knowledgeable Other in guiding my thinking. Recently one of my computers was overheating. I searched for and found a web site telling me at what temperature the Northbridge chip should be running (it was running much hotter). I then found a YouTube video showing me how to take my computer apart and clean the filters. Is this formal or informal learning? Do I have scaffolding and guidance in my learning? I would suggest I do.

Even more problematic is Steve’s idea of “informal technology”. I think this may just be careless use of terminology. Of course technologies are not informal or formal. However what is certainly true is that most young people today own various technology based devices, which can be used or as John Cook calls it “appropriated” for learning. And as we move towards near ubiquitous connectivity, at least in richer countries, then these devices provide constant access to all kinds of learning – including contact to those with more knowledge than we have. It is interesting to note that most of this learning takes place in the absence of purpose built education technology, rather we appropriate applications designed for business or enterprise use or for entertainment, for learning.

I think more useful than setting a dichotomy between the formal and the informal is to explore the different relationships and contexts in which learning takes place. Last year Jenny Hughes and I made a slidecast called Critical Literacies, Pragmatics and Education as part of a Critical Literacies course being run by Rita Kop and Stephen Downes as part of their ongoing research project on Personal Learning Environments.

In this we referred to the relationships in which learning take place. These include the relationships between learners and teachers, between the learners themselves and between the learners and the wider community.

We went on to look at context. Obviously this includes place or physical context, which could be described as the learning domain. This might be a school or college, the workplace or at home. Important here is the distance between the different domains. Sometimes this distance will be short (say in the case of an apprenticeship involving workplace and school based study), but sometimes there may be a quite broad seperation between the different domains.

A second context is the social, cultural and political environment in which earning takes place. A third – and to my mind critical – context is the idea of what is legitimate learning – what is learnt and how it is learnt. Obviously this involves the idea of control.

Especially important is the context of how we recognise achievement – how outcomes are defined, what value is placed on learning, by whom and how.

We also raised the idea of discourses – the sum total of the conversations around education. In the past, we suggested, education has tended to be a top down discourse with prescribed and structured strategies  for learning. This is changing and now leaners may be more likely to start from practice without a predetermined strategy for learning.

Thus relations and context or learning are becoming fluid and are contently changing. Technology is playing a major role in these changing relationships and contexts. Such a fluid discourse inevitably leads to conflict with an educational structure based on top down educational discourses.

The first blog of the new year looks at what I see as something of a contradiction for those of us wanting to change and hopefully improve education. Lets look at two trends from 2010.

In terms of the use of technology for teaching and learning we saw limited technical innovation. OK, the UK saw an increasing trend towards providing Virtual Learning environments (mainly Moodle) in primary schools. Applications like Google docs and Dropbox allowed enhanced facilities for collaborative work and file sharing. However neither of these was designed specifically for educational use. Indeed the main technical trend may have been on the one hand the increased use of social software and cloud computing apps for learning and on the other hand a movement away from free social software towards various premium business models. Of course mobile devices are fast evolving and are making an increasing impact on teaching and learning.

But probably the main innovation was in terms of pedagogy and in wider approaches to ideas around learning. and here the major development is around open learning. Of course we do not have a precise or agreed definition of what open education or open learning means. But the movement around Open Educational Resources appears to be becoming a part of the mainstream development in the provision of resources for tecahing and learning, despite significant barriers still to be overcome.  And there is increasing open and free tecahing provision be it through online ‘buddy’ systems, say for language learning, various free courses available through online VLEs and the proliferation of programmes offered as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) using a variety of both educational and social software. Whilst we are still struggling to develop new financial models for such programmes, perhaps the major barrier is recognition. This issue can be viewed at three different levels.

1. The first level is a more societal issue of how we recognise learning (or attainment). at the moment this tends to be through the possession of accreditation or certification from accredited institutions. Recognition takes the form of entry into a profession or job, promotion to a higher level or increased pay.
2. The second level is that of accreditation. Who should be able to provide such accreditation and perhaps more importantly what should it be for (this raises the question of curriculum).
3. The third is the issue of assessment. Although traditional forms of individual assessment can be seen as holding back more innovative and group based forms of teaching and learning there are signs of movement in this direction – see, for example the Jisc Effective Assessment in a Digital Age, featured as his post of the year by Stephen Downes.

These issues can be overcome and I think there are significant moves towards recognising broader forms of learning in different contexts. In this respect, the development of Personal Learning Environments and Personal Learning Networks are an important step forward in allowing access to both technology and sources of learning to those not enrolled in an institution.

However, such ‘progress’ is not without contradiction. One of the main gains of social democratic and workers movements over the last century has been to win free access to education and training for all based on nee4d rather than class or income. OK, there are provisos. Such gains were for those in rich industrialised countries – in many areas of the world children still have no access to secondary education – let alone university. Even in those rich countries, there are still big differences in terms of opportunities based on class. And it should not be forgotten that whilst workers movements have fought for free and universal access to education, it has been the needs of industry and the economic systems which have tended to prevail in extending access (and particularly in moulding the forms of provision (witness the widely different forms of the education systems in northern Europe).

Now those gains are under attack. With pressures on econo0mies due of the collapse of the world banking system, governments are trying to roll back on the provision of free education. In countries like the UK, the government is to privatise education – both through developing a market driven system and through transferring the cost of education from the state to the individual or family.

Students have led an impressive (and largely unexpected) fightback in the UK and the outcome of this struggle is by no means clear. Inevitably they have begun to reflect on the relation between their learning and the activities they are undertaking in fighting the increases in fees and cutbacks in finances, thus raising the issue of the wider societal purposes and forms of education.

And that also poses issues for those of us who have viewed the adoption of technology for learning as an opportunity for innovation and change in pedagogy and for extending learning (through Open Education) to those outside schools and universities. How can we defend traditional access to institutional learning, whilst at the same time attacking it for its intrinsic limitations.

At their best, both the movements around Open Education and the student movement against cuts have begun to pose wider issues of pedagogy and the purpose and form of education as will as the issues of how we recognise learning. One of the most encouraging developments in the student movement in the UK has been the appropriation of both online and physical spaces to discuss these wider issues (interestingly in opposition to the police who have in contrast attempted to close access to spaces and movement through he so-called kettling tactic).

I wonder now, if it is possibel to bring together the two different movements to develop new visions of education together with a manifesto or rather manifestos for aschieveing such visions.

Great presentation by Steve Wheeler from the EDEN Research Workshop, 2010.

This is the first of a two part blog looking at future and emergent technologies and their implications for learning and teaching and the training of teachers. In this part we look at emergent technologies, in the second we will examine a number of key issues arising from these trends.

Technologies are rapidly evolving and although there is evidence to suggest education lags behind in its adoption of new technologies for teaching and learning  emerging technologies will inevitably impact on education.

This raises a whole series of issues, including how we can train teachers for the emerging technologies they will use in the future rather than those technologies presently in common use. Furthermore, as new technologies are implemented in work processes, this will change curricula demands. We have already commented on changing ideas of digital literacy and the possible impact on pedagogy and student expectations.

The emergence of new technologies cannot be separated from wider issues impacting on education and training. The present economic crisis is leading to new demands in terms of education and at the same time is likely to lead to financial restrictions for institutions.

Emergent technologies also have implications for future infrastructure requirements and may be expected to impact on institutional organisation.

Rather than focus on technology alone, it is more useful to examine the possible social effects of technologies – the socio-technical trends.

Given the fast changing evolution of technologies there is difficulty in predicting future trends and developments within the education sector. This is exacerbated by an increasing tendency to appropriate technologies developed for other purposes for teaching and learning, rather than develop bespoke educational technology. There are many possible future trends and in the literature review accompanying this study we provide an extensive overview. Here we mention but a few.

Each year since 2003, the New Media Consortium, in conjunction with the Educause Learning Initiative, has published an annual report 2002 identifying and describing emerging technologies “likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years.”

In the 2010 report (Johnson, Levine, Smith, and Stone, 2010) they identify four trends as key drivers of technology adoptions for the period 2010 to 2015:

• The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
• People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
• The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
• The work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more cross campus collaboration between departments.

As well as trends they also report on key challenges:

• The role of the academy — and the way we prepare students for their future lives — is changing.
• New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind.
• Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
• Institutions increasingly focus more narrowly on key goals, as a result of shrinking budgets in the present economic climate.

They look at three adoption horizons for new technologies in education “that indicate likely time frames for their entrance into mainstream use for teaching, learning, or creative inquiry.”

On their near term for the next twelve months are are mobile computing and open content.

They predict that in the next two to three years out, we will begin to see widespread adoptions of electronic books and simple augmented reality.

In the longer term future, set at four to five years away for widespread adoption are gesture-based computing and visual data analysis.

Steve Wheeler (2010) says we are moving from Web 1 where the web connects information web 1 to social software connecting people with Web 2 and to the semantic web connecting knowledge with Web 3. He predicts the metaweb will connect intelligence in what he names as ‘Web x’.

The technologies which will enable this include

• distributed cloud computing
• extended smart mobile technology
• collaborative, intelligent filtering
• 3D visualisation and interaction (Wheeler, 2010)

In this vision learning content is not as important as knowing where or who to connect to to find it. Such a move is facilitated by the growing trend towards federated repositories of Open Educational Resources (OERs), which can be freely reused and re-purposed.

A further trend, in part based on these emergent technologies, is the possible move away from Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) towards Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). 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 (Attwell, 2010). 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.

It is notable that predictions of emergent trends for education tend to be more focused towards schools and higher education. There is limited analysis of their potential impact in vocational education. In reality, emerging, socio-technical developments could be mobilised to create widely divergent education systems.

Ceri Facer (2009) says “The developments in remote interactions and in disaggregation of content from institution; the rise of the personal ‘cloud‘; the diagnostic potential of genetic and neuro-science; the ageing population; all of these, when combined with different social, political and cultural values lead to very different pedagogies, curriculum, institutional arrangements and cultural dispositions towards learners.”
Facer (ibid) suggests that “the coming two decades may see a significant shift away from the equation of ‘learning‘ with ‘educational institutions‘ that emerged with industrialisation, toward a more mixed, diverse and complex learning landscape which sees formal and informal learning taking place across a wide range of different sites and institutions.”

Facer (ibid) says that rather than try to develop a single blueprint for dealing with change we should rather develop a resilient education system based on diversity to deal with the different challenges of an uncertain future. But such diversity “will emerge only if educators, researchers and communities are empowered to develop localised or novel responses to socio-technical change – including developing new approaches to curriculum, to assessment, to the workforce and governance, as well as to pedagogy.”

This approach, if adopted, would have major implications for the training of teachers in the use of new technologies for teaching and learning. Firstly it means a move towards an understanding of the social impact of technologies and of socio-technical developments, rather than a focus on technology per se.
Secondly it places a high value on creativity and and willingness to explore, model and experiment with new pedagogic approaches. In this respect competences cannot be based on prescribed outcomes but rather in innovation in process. Furthermore it implies a movement towards creativity and innovation in the training of teachers and trainers and freedom to develop more localised and novel responses to the socio technical change, rather than a standardised curricula response.

The approach also is predicated on an informed debate of educational futures and educational values. Teachers and trainee teachers need to be part of that debate.

References

Facer, K. (2009) Beyond Current Horizons: for DCSFBristol: Futurelab www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk

Johnson, L., Levine, A., Smith, R., & Stone, S. (2010). The Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Wheeler, S. (2010). Web 3.0: The Way Forward? http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2010/07/web-30-way-forward.html.

The debate over open learning is still going on through various fora such as the Open Educational Resources discussion currently being hosted by UNESCO and the #PLENK2010 MOOC. And in many ways, it is not technology which is driving the discussion but a more fundamental question about how to provide wider access to learning and access to wider groups of learners.

One post which caught my eye is The ‘Open Mode’ – A Step Toward Completely Online by Tom Prescott (it is interesting to note that even in the days of Twitter;s ascendency blog posts continue to provide the most thoughtful exchanges).

Talking about the trend away from purely online distance learning courses towards blended learning, Tom says:

It’s wrong because most of the time the educators and the students don’t really want to use technology. They’ll do a bit for the administration, but for learning, no way. It’s a face-to-face course. Why tamper with it. I am of the opinion that this is misguided, but it’s not a battle worth fighting (for now). Fighting this resentment is unnecessary.

I think Tom is mixing up a whole series of things here. Firstly the move towards Blended Learning was driven by pedagogy and not by a retreat from Technology Enhanced Learning. And that move towards Blended Learning has led to a period of pedagogic innovation, albeit based on the adoption of social software and social networking for learning. By focusing on the pedagogy of using technology, increasing numbers of teachers have adopted technology as part of their every day practices in tecahing and learning. This is reflected in changes in teachers’ dispositions towards using technology. I would also challenge the idea that students are opposed to technology for learning. Students are opposed to the use of technology which fails to enhance their learning experience, just precisely to the use of technology for managing, rather than learning.

But the major impact of technologies and especially of mobile devices, is to move learning outside the institutional culture and practice, into new contexts. Of course this provides a challenge to existing institutional cultures and to the existing cultures of tecahing and learning practice. And some teachers will be wary of such a challenge. But its is the potentials of using technology for informal learning, for networked and self structured  learning (as in PLENK2010) and for workbased learning which can open up learning (or put another way, develop Open Learning).

I remain unconvinced that traditional online courses (as in Open and Distance Learning) have challenged that learning in context. Instead they have tended to reproduce existing pedagogic and cultural forms of learning, at a distance. Thus I think we need to see more diversified and contextual applications of technology to learning, rather than a focus on any particular organisational or institutional format.