I’m in a bar in Sofia – grabbing a bit of bandwidth. And in comes this interesting email.

“Dear Dr. Attwell,” it says, (thanks for the Doctorate, I am a sucker for flattery), “I am a producer for the Spanish Americas Section of the BBC World Service. I am writing an article about Online Educa Berlin and I would like to have a telephone interview with you about Podcasting.

The idea is to talk about Podcasting as a tool for learning, what is the potential and the future of the tool, the plus and the minus points.”

Well how could I refuse. But I thought it might be time to do a little research about podcasts, as opposed to just making them. I remembered the excellent Impala project – I have an interview with one of the project researchers, Ming Nie, due out next week. The IMPALA project, funded by the UK Higher Education Academy, is investigating the impact of podcasting on student learning and how the beneficial effects can positively be enhanced.

Perhaps more interestingly, the IMPALA partners are experimenting with a range of pedagogical models to address specific challenges in teaching and learning.

I searched around the various project web sites, wikis, blogs and presentations. I am not sure about their first attempt at a model – it seems to me overly media / technology prescriptive. But some of the work looking at the pedagogic use of podcasts is very useful.

In a paper presented at a JISC Workshop on Innovative E‐Learning with Mobile and Wireless Technologies, they say podcasts can be used:To support online learning and to integrate other e‐learning activities – a profcast model

In a presentation at Alt C, 2007 Ming Nie says podcasting can “facilitate collaborative learning and skills development through dialogue (Allen, 2005; Laurillard, 2002;Wenger, 1998).
Ming Nie goes on to say podcasting can be used to “Capture Informal Knowledge, Experience, feelings, viewpoints through conversation, discussion, debate. Podcasting is Personal, interesting and engaging.”

From conversations with e-learning researchers and practitioners in the corporate sector, I think education is behind in this. Many large companies are already using podcasting to develop and capture informal learning. the problem with education is it isn’t quite sure about informal learning. Yes it is there. yes, it is probably a good thing. But do we really want to sanction knowledge acquisition which takes place outside of the classroom or the VLE and outside the approved sanction of the official curriculum.

The issue of digital literacy will not go away. And it reappears in strange forms. Every six months or so there is a surge of posts on teh Becata research list serve suggesting all kids should be taught to touch type. Fair enough – if I could type properly it would save me a lot of time in correcting errors. But I don’t really see the keyboard lasting much longer as the main form of talking to a computer.

Anyway, it has always seemed to me that one of the big challenges arising from the idea of digital literacy is the curriculum. I am quite bemused by curricula in general. Whatever research we undertake, whatever needs we show, the development of curricula seems to go on in a seperate and parallel universe. There was one project that I evaluated which greatly impressed me. Martin Owen was one of the project partners and his guest blog on this page earlier this week reminded me of the project. It was called i-Curriculum and it set out to research and develop guidelines for curricula for developing digital literacy. At least that is what I think the project was about. The official European project blurb says:

“The I-Curriculum framework is a set of guidelines that can be used by policy makers, teachers and other educators, the producers of digital resources, and students to check whether a project or lesson achieves the goal of enabling active participation in lifelong learning practices. This framework could help in the examination of current curriculum and learning design, locating the process within the demands of changing cultures and mapping educational provision onto the new demands of new contexts in which life, work and education interact.”

Central to the project is the framework.

“The framework represents a shift away from the notion of key skills. It looks at an activity as developing various skills related to digital literacies, the areas are:

• exchanging and sharing information; communication and collaboration
• researching: finding things out
• modelling
• working practices and attitudes.

Across each of these skill areas are three levels of curriculum activity:

The Operational Curriculum is learning to use the tools and technology effectively. Knowing how to word-process, how to edit a picture, enter data and make simple queries of an information system, save and load files and so on.

The Integrating Curriculum is where the uses of technology are applied to current curricula and organisation of teaching and learning. This might be using an online library of visual material, using a virtual learning environment to deliver a course or part of a
course. The nature of the subject and institution of learning is essentially the same, but technology is used for efficiency, motivation and effectiveness.

The Transformational Curriculum is based on the notion that what we might know, and how and when we come to know it has changed by the existence of the technologies we use and therefore the curriculum and organisation of teaching and learning needs to change
to reflect those changes.

There is implied inclusion of levels along the axis, but it is not the case that you need to study in an operational way before you become transformational. There is a real danger in making that assumption. If you start from the position that you are going to be transformational or integrative then you do not approach the acquisition of operational skills in the same way. If the curriculum is viewed in such a way that competence operations in themselves are the learning outcomes then teaching can be fairly mechanical – however, if the curriculum is designed to be transformational, the acquisition of the operational skills is needs driven,
intrinsic, secure in a model of transferability and almost taken-for-granted.”

If you are interested, FutureLab have a web page giving access to the final report. The report contains the following sections
Background – this section defines what is meant by digital literacy skills in this document, and how we can distinguish between levels of competency.

The framework – discusses the theoretical underpinnings of the matrix as well as presenting the matrix.

Case studies – three illustrative case studies taken from some of the partner countries that demonstrate how current practice can be considered using the framework as an assessment tool.

Conclusions and recommendations – this summarises the findings and recommendations for the EU with respect to the development of digital literacy skills.

The project web site also provides access to many of the projects working documents. Some of these are avaiable in Greek, Spanish and German, as well as English.

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.

There is nothing surprising in the report in the Guardian on a study by Cambridge University on standards in primary school. Perhaps most shocking is that it has taken so long fro someone to say this. And that in the face of all the evidence the UK government still refuses to acknowledge that the test and target regime introduced in English schools is a failure: a failure in raising standards, a failure in imposing unreasonable stress on students, a failure in terms of constraining pedagogic approaches and a failure to trust in imagination and learning.

“As many as one in three primary school children is given the wrong marks in national tests, according to a report on standards in primary schools.

Sats for seven- and 11-year-olds, which are used to assess their progress and feed into national school league tables, are unreliable, put pupils under psychological pressure and have had little impact, the report says.

The researchers accuse the government of ignoring academic evidence, backed by the then Statistics Commission, that the dramatic rises in results in the run-up to 2000 were “exaggerated”.

The report commissioned for Cambridge University’s review of primary education comes after the prime minister pledged to put testing at the heart of the next phase of the government’s plan to eradicate failure. Ministers believe that without nationally comparable tests teachers are not able to target pupils who are falling behind.

The reports document research showing that up to one in three pupils is given the wrong mark at the end of the tests. Short papers with questions that have a narrow range of possible answers mean that pupils’ skills are not rigorously tested, leaving a wide margin of error.”

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Why am I suddenly so interested in Blended Learning. Well…partly because Pontydysgu, for whom I work, is a partner on a project producing a handbook on Blended Learning.

Previously I tended to think the term is a little silly. As Frances Bell says in a recent blog post, all learning is blended so why use the term? But I think the various understandings of Blended Learning reflect a movement towards wider and more pedagogically considered use of ICT for learning within the ‘traditional’ curriculum, rather than being confined to Distance Learning or project based contexts. And that surely is to be welcomed.

A team of researchers from the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development (OCSLD) has completed a review of the UK literature and practice relating to the undergraduate experience of blended learning. The study aimed to review existing research and practice on blended e-learning, identify key studies and issues, and make recommendations to guide future policy and practice.  The review team combined traditional desk research, with institutional visits and interviews with key personnel.           

The review report  addresses the current meanings of ‘blended learning’ across the sector, the underlying institutional rationales for blended learning, the monitoring and evaluation strategies being adopted for ensuring and enhancing the quality of blended e-learning.  The review has found that the student response to the provision of online information to supplement traditional teaching is overwhelmingly positive.  It is clear from the uptake of this area of technology by institutions, the rise of the use of the term ‘blended learning’ and the number of evaluative studies identified in the review, that institutions and practitioners are attempting to engage with blended learning and are doing so successfully.

This is certainly worth a read.

More on last weeks B-learning project meeting.

I invited Tony Toole from the University of Glamorgan to speak at the meeting. The CELT centre at the university is doing some interesting work which deserves a bigger audience. I’ve never been particularly keen on the term blended learning. On the one hand it seems to state the obvious, on the other hand it is difficult to know what it means. The CELT website itself says: “The phrase ‘blended learning’ can mean many different things to different people. Indeed the definitional complexities take up lots of pages of academic reflection. Phrases like ‘e-learning’, ‘online learning’ and ‘technology enhanced education’ are also equally open to a range of interpretations.”

However, I can see the attraction of the term in allowing a focus on pedagogic approaches to the use of technology enhanced learning. The CELT web site goes on to say: “At Glamorgan we have adopted a definition of blended learning which is designed to locate the development of these activities within the wider University agenda of enhancing learning and teaching. We would argue that Blended Learning involves:

CELT has produced an excellent handbook on blended learning – called ‘Smoothies’. It is available for free download from the web site and is well worth a look. I particularly like the practical approach and the provision of templates both for reflection and to develop additional resources for the web site.

Seems like finally a bit of discussion is opening up around deschooling society.

Wolfgang Greller, commenting on my presentation at the  Salzburg Edumedia conference “where I argued that we had to de-school society to enable real and effective life-long learning, says, “it would be very destructive to society to leave learning entirely to self-arranged activities [because learning] also includes learning about your dislikes and opening new, unexpected doors.”

Stephen Downes has responded “This is a common response, the essence of which is the fear that learners will make the wrong choices, learn the wrong things, or not learn at all. Which leads me to ask: are we doing so well now? Children grow up today illiterate, they grow up with racist or other prejudices, they grow up violent, and millions upon millions grow up without an education at all. I’m not saying we should suddenly shut the door – that would be irresponsible. But I think that , instead of trying more and more management (which, incidentally, makes education more and more expensive), we could try less management. Watching, yes, to be sure no great disaster happens. But letting go.”

The slide which is causing the discussion is only a small part of my presentation. But I will elaborate more on the ideas in a short podcast on this blog tomorrow. Meanwhile here are a few notes I write last December on this subject and which I hope to base a future, more worked out, paper.

The industrial model of education and institutional organisation

Why do I call our present education systems and institutions an industrial model? I would argue the forms of education and learning provision we have developed have arisen in response to the first industrial revolution – of mass industrialisation – and of ways of learning and organising knowledge development inherent in such a social model. In this section I will look at some of the key features of the systems. of course this can only be an ideal type model. I am aware that different cultures have developed different forms of such an industrial system and that there are many, many instances of brave – if isolated – attempts to innovate and go beyond the limitations of the present system. Furthermore within different cultures – and countries – there may coexist different forms of organisation and of schooling. I am also aware that my taxonomy is neither a true one or complete but I did say in the introduction that this was a work in progress!

Motivation

In most European countries education is compulsory from between the ages of 5 and 7 to between the ages of 14 and 18. There are legal sanctions against parents for their children not attending school. Education for older learners is voluntary, with grants available in some countries. Motivation for post compulsory education is generally seen as the opportunity for better employment and higher pay.

Ethos

There appears to be an interesting dualism to the ethos for education systems. On the one hand education is posed as an entitlement for integration and participation in society and for providing an understanding of the tenets of arts and sciences; on the other hand more recently the role of education in providing the skills and knowledge required for employability has been increasingly stressed.

Institutional organisation

Institutions organised by age group or sector of education on geographical basis. Sometimes also organised on subject basis.

Management

Institutions usually managed by appointed managers. In some countries under national government direction, in other local government plays a role. some systems provide for representation of parent and or / students and in some countries are elected senior managers.

Curriculum

Most important feature is division of learning into subjects. Usually based on post Renaissance subject taxonomy based on disciplines. In some countries there is a national curriculum, developed by ‘experts’, in other curriculum guidelines. Often curriculum severely restrained by requirements of qualifications. Varying degree of autonomy for institutions in developing own curriculum. Little option for students, at least in compulsory school sector.

Curriculum is organised on basis of graded progression through sequence of learning objectives towards attainment of prescribed body of skills and knowledge.

Pedagogy

Various espoused and practices of pedagogy (I am unconvinced they are always the same). however whatever approach to learning and teaching is adopted, pedagogic approaches are heavily influenced by curriculum and forms of school organisation.

Times

Institutions are usually organised around a three term or semester year, with set times for the start and end of learning activities.

Classes / forms / Groups

Most institutions divide students into classes, forms or groups for learning. These may be based on age, on previous attainment or even on the alphabetical order of the students name! Students may remain in the same group for different classes, or may change between different groups.

Buildings and classrooms

Education takes place in buildings built or designed for that purpose. In some countries the buildings are walled or fenced off to keep students in and non-students out. Buildings are typically divided into classrooms for between 10 and 30 learners with the provision of a desk for each learner and a desk at the front for a teacher. May also be specialised laboratories and workshops for teaching particular subjects requiring specialised equipment. Higher education facilities have larger lecture theatres in an amphitheatre design.

Contexts for learning

Apart from apprenticeship schemes and other vocational education and training programmes, most learning is based in the institution. Students may undertake a period of work-practice – but that is predominantly to learn about the world of work – rather than to learn through working.

Learning materials

Largely based on standardised textbooks produced by commercial publishers

Enrolment

Learners are usually enrolled in a single institution on the basis of their age and / or where they live. They will progress to another institution dependent on age or attainment.

Qualifications

Qualifications set by national or regional bodies. Usually based on individual examinations although coursework may be taken into account in some cases.

Role of teachers

Teachers key role is to manage the learning of individual students (within classes and groups) and to enable the attainment of the curricular objectives within the different subject areas. Teachers are ‘experts’ in their subject.

Quality

Usually through external inspection, although may be some elements of institutional self evaluation. In some countries tables are published showing attainment rates in qualifications.

Funding

Usually form central or local government based on number of full time students. In some cases may be attainment based. Also may be extra funding for innovation and projects.

In summary our education systems have been designed to efficiently and with some degree of equity, instil a basic level of skills and knowledge over a set period of time.

There is limited choice for individual learners, neither indeed do schools have a great deal to freedom in what they teach.

The overwhelming focus of the education system is on institutional learning, with limited provision for learning from work or from the community. The community  of learners – or rather the group of learners is based on geographical proximity, age and or attainment.

It is not only the strictly managed and controlled learning environment that will inhibit the development and implementation of PLEs but the approach and organisation of knowledge within the institutions.

If PLEs are to contribute to what I call the relearning of society, we need to re-examine how we organise education. The next and final section, begins to sketch out a new vision for education or learning provision in the future.

Personal Learning environments and Relearning Society

The de-institutionalisation or at least recasting the role and organisation of institutions is the greatest need in terms of reforming education and introducing Personal Learning Environments. It is not only that the present institutional structures are too inflexible to support PLEs, but that they fail to provide support for the many different contexts in which learning is taking place.

Instead we could envisage the idea of Community Learning Centres. These would be support centres open to all ages of learners – at least form the age of 11 or 12 upwards – although there is a case for  maintaining separate primary learning provision. Critically such centres would be networked allowing access support for learning presently only available in specialist schools or in Higher Education Institutions, within the community.

Learners would work on projects combining elements form different subjects. Individual learning plans would be developed through the PLE with the support of what is now called teachers. Such projects would be undertaken in teams with ‘teachers’ facilitating learning. Teams could be geographically based but might well include participants form other Community Learning Centres and from other countries participating through networked communication. Although this might seem far fetched, many young people participate in on-line communities involving participants form different countries in their leisure time.

Projects would include the wider community including community based organisations and enterprises.

Learners would be able to access federated (or central) repositories of Open Educational Resources. New resources, created by ‘teachers’ to meet the particular need of a learning task would be added to such a repository.

Progress and attainment would be recorded in the group and individual Personal Learning Environment. Learners a-would be encouraged to produce regular presentations of their work, which would be shared on line and also provide a resource both for other learners and for the broader community.

Community Learning Centres would support wider community resources including provision for adult learners and support for single parents. Parents and retired people would be encouraged to assist  with the learning provision. Centres would be controlled by the local community, with regular and open meetings to discuss management and future development.

Buildings would be designed to facilitate interaction between small groups of learners, providing privacy and quiet for intense activities but also encouraging transparency and communication. It goes without saying that they would also provide access to bandwidth and to Information and Communication Technologies.

Higher Education providers would be given a new role in supporting networked Community Learning Centres. But with more learning occurring at local level, and learners participating in the network of centres as a whole, not an individual institution, they would also be able to return to their core role as centres of research (with that research shared under Creative Commons and Science Commons licences).

Whilst negotiated learning plans would recognise the need for breadth of learning, they would also take into account the particular interests of individual learners.

Hopefully over a period of time the motivation for learning would cease to be compulsion, but rather the opportunity for participation in learning activities. However, it may be that we have advanced the leaving age for full time education too far young people form say 14 or 15 should be offered the opportunity to undertake paid work whilst learning.

Is this utopian? I do not think so. the development of PLEs is not a major impossibility – indeed we already have prototype applications – although more work needs to be done in the area of provision of services. There are many examples of innovative projects operating in similar ways to what I have described (including projects working with socially disadvantaged learners). The problem is that such projects operate where they can find space in the curriculum and  institutional organisation, often with  external project funding, and where their  are enthusiastic and skilled teachers. Of course generalising such an approach will require Professional Development to enable teachers to play a very new role. It will require reducing the control of institutions and the reshaping of learning provision. However, the kind of scenarios I have described above can be found every day in kindergartens. If we can do it for 3 and 4 year olds why not for older learners?

Over the last year I have made a series of short videos as part of the European Commission sponsored ASSIPA course. The videos are based on original footage shot at a face to face course. You can find all of the videos linked through the ASSIPA wiki pages (I will write more about ASSIPA next week.

The first video I edited was of a ‘coins exercise’ – designed to show in a practical way how good and bad teaching impacts on learners. It was great material but took me ages to do – and I still got the aspect ration wrong. Still, I was very attached to this movie. And then one day I logged on to my Google account form a strange computer. Pressed a couple of buttons (in German) and realised I had said I refused to accept Google’s conditions. How does Goggle react – they instantly delete all your videos! Oh well, I thought – I will have to upload the videos again – and that is what I did. Except I couldn’t find a copy of the coins video anywhere. I must have inadvertently culled it in one of my periodic attempts to get rid of old bits of old video.

Well I though about remaking the video but couldn’t quite summons up the heart to do it. And then last week I was talking with Woif Hilzensauer at Salzburg airport and he told me how much he liked the video. Ah – I said – its a shame but I lost it. I’ve got a copy on my iPod he said. And so he had. So I copied it to my computer and it is back up on Google again. So – if you would like to watch the video after such a long intro – just click here.

There’s hope for digital preservation yet.

waiting for the eportfolio ‘pull’:

As part of the MOSEP e-Portfolio project we have created our own portfolios in ELGG Spaces. As always it is difficult getting people started but there are three of us there now and I hope the other project partners will get involved in the next ten days.

But one of our colleagues, John Pallister, who is an IT teacher at Wolsingham School in Durham has posted a brilliant series posts based on his personal experiences in introducing e-Portfolios in his school.

I am reposting his entry from yesterday in its entirety in the hope it will inspire others of you to go read his blog.

Why are our students prepared to work with their eportfolios? Acknowledging that some students, especially some of the older students, are a little reluctant to develop their eportfolios- the vast majority will work on them with very little ‘push’ from staff. The older students, who are not as ‘interested’ in their eportfolios, are tending to fit into the waiting for the ‘pull’ from the universities and employers category. Of course it is always easier to sit back and wait until the big picture is clear, rather than to do something, but we are dealing with students – we need to sort out the ‘big picture’ and declare the drivers now. – Quite a job! For ??

The creative environment provided by the multimedia authoring packaged has helped to motivate our students. It could be argued that, without evidence of reflection, the eportfolio is simply a creative product. Well, I see every day, evidence that students are proud of the product and want to develop it. We have won the first battle, we have sorted out the software/hardware and have given students a multimedia authoring tool that they want to use. As a by-product, the ICT multimedia skills level in the school has risen significantly.

The majority of my recent posts have focussed on reflection and audience. Historically, although as Gerlinde suggests, reflection is a natural part of what students do, students have not wanted to explicitly reflect. The ‘write about your holidays’ prompt was always a hassle and even ‘writing up science experiments’ and reflecting on whether it proved or disproved the original hypothesis tended to became a mechanical process without a lot of meaning/value for the student. Students tended to develop the set responses that they thought teachers wanted, they regurgitated these responses and thought very little about the process and how the might tackle it in the future/ what they ad learnt etc.

Again, picking up on Gerlinde point about student reluctance to record reflections in a written form, they might have gone through a very useful reflective process, and then not wanted to record their reflections in writing, or, they might have rushed-off some stock written reflections, devaluing the whole process.

Can Technology do it, (help), of course it can. Students might be more prepared to record audio reflections – why should a students reluctance to write, or their poor literacy skills stop them from reflecting, might the microphone liberate the learner?

How, as teachers, we encourage students to reflect and record their reflections is the next challenge, closely followed by how we contrive/provide/engineer ‘audience’ to support the process. I suspect that we need to encourage and link recorded reflections against the evidence of the original learning/activity. A general Blogg would probably be very awkward for the audience. – The calculations, if every learner in the UK created a blogg, who would be doing the reading? Ah – audience again!

waiting for the eportfolio ‘pull’, John Pallister :: Blog, February 19

I read a lot of journal and conference papers – its part of my job. And just occasionally, you read one and think ‘wow, this is so cool’.

So, I am recommending the following paper to you – ‘Authenticity in Learning: Transactional Learning in Virtual Communities‘ by Karen Barton, Patricia McKellar and Paul Maharg.

The context for their work is law education but the ideas in the paper apply to any sphere of learning. The first part of the paper looks at the idea of authenticity. I was particularly taken by a quote from Barab, Squire & Dueber (2000) who say “authenticity lies ‘not in the learner, the task or the environment, but in the dynamic interactions among these various components […] authenticity is manifest in the flow itself, and is not an objective feature of any one component in isolation”.

They go on to describe the environment they have designed for providing simulations of legal practice.

They suggest that “if we focus on creating carefully-designed simulation tasks along the lines of what I shall call ‘transactional learning’ and create flexible, sensitive software instruments by which students can express themselves and carry out that task-based learning, then we become involved in creating an environment where students can begin to comprehend through active learning the complexity of a professional legal task or transaction.

They also define transactional learning based on their practice as:

• Transactional learning is active learning
  
  Transactional learning is based on doing legal transactions.
  
  Transactional learning involves reflection on learning.
  
  Transactional learning is based on collaborative learning.
  
  Transactional learning requires holistic or process learning.

Students work in groups of four, forming virtual legal companies. Particularly important is that assessment is based on the performance of the company, not of individual students, with members of the company responsible for agreeing on the work to be submitted.

The only slight disappointment with the paper is the conclusion, which talks about change management. I’m not saying change management is not important, but it doesn’t really fit with the rest of the paper.

Great stuff – make sure you read this. And thanks to Al Harris who forwarded me a copy.

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