I,m working on a new paper on PLEs. I’m finding the idea of Rhizomatic learning extremely useful. Here is an extract from the paper.

‘Technologies are changing fast and our use of technologies is changing faster. In looking to the future it may be worth returning ot the them of rhizomatic learning (Cormier, 2008). Dave Cormier says the rhizome is a botanical metaphor. “A rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the limits of its habitat. In the rhizomatic view, knowledge can only be negotiated, and the contextual, collaborative learning experience shared by constructivist and connectivist pedagogies is a social as well as a personal knowledge-creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises.”
Such social processes in the use of technology for learning and knowledge creation have been seen in a conference and a summer school which I have recently attended. In both, we created a tweme for the event, a mash up of delicious, twitter and flickr based on a common tab. In neither case did we pre-announce the use of the tweme, neither was the use of the particular technology officially prescribed nor indeed endorsed by the event organizers. However the use of the tweme for knowledge sharing was adopted organically by participants and became the main means of ICT based communication and sharing. In one case the conference organizers had established their own NetVibes site for the mash up of blogs; however by the second day they recognized what was happening and emailed participants to inform them that the tweme was “ the main channel for information” going on to say “Please have a look on it because the freshest and the hottest information can be found only from there.”

One interesting effect of the use of twitter and twemes was to facilitate the unplanned participation of researchers and practitioners from all over the world in the vents and a consequent wider and open dialogue than the original programme and curriculum design had envisaged. The curriculum was being increasingly developed by the community and the community extended to include participants who were not present face to face.

The technological development facilitating such change was the availability of connectivity and the use of different devices. In fact at the first conference connectivity was problematic. The wireless network became overloaded. Nevertheless, participants found ways of communicating, using other mobile phones or a skype to twitter interface which required less bandwidth than a browser. Those with access to neither simply recorded their observations and rushed off to find better bandwidth in the coffee break.

The agenda and curricula of the vents became extended through participants negotiating topics they wished to explore through the ongoing discourse and organising ‘unconferencing’ events outside the main programme.

Such experiences may point the way to how personal learning environments will evolve in the future. The PLE will not be one application running on the desktop or in a web browser. Rather, it will be multiple applications running on may different devices. It is also important to understand that learners will use different devices in different contexts and for different purposes. The PLE will be based on networks of people with whom learners interact, they may adapt a particular tool for communication and interaction in a particular context but then cease to sue that tool when that context has passed. In previous projects linked to mobile learning we have tended to focus on how to transmit standardised learning materials and applications to different platforms and devices.

The PLE will be comprised of not only all the software tools, applications and services we use for learning but the different devices we use to communicate and share knowledge.

This if knowledge seen as resting in connections and learning bases on those connections then PLE may be sum of devices plus use of those devices for learning. Another way to view the PLE is to see it as the summation of connections we make in a nodal learning network. This includes, of course, face-to-face interactions both in terms of participation in learning programmes and events but also one to one and informal interactions and an ongoing process of reflection and sense making of such interactions. Learning and learning environments become synonymous with the identity of the leaner, both the self perceived identity and the learner as others perceive them.

Or PLEs, Mupples and PLSs. Its a bit of a mouthful. A couple of weeks ago the iCamp project came up with the idea of Mupples – Mashup Personal Learning Environments. “Mash-ups, the ‘frankensteining’ of software artefacts and data”, they say “have enabled a new generation of learning tools. Web-applications, services, and data can now be endlessly recombined, no matter where they reside.” I think this is a helpful idea. And they are organising a conference on it in September.

Now this morning comes the idea of Personalised Learning Systems. The term is used in a blog post by Ken Carroll from Praxis Language based in Shanghai. I met Hank Horkoff, the CEO, last week and was mightily impressed with the work they are doing (watch this spot for a Sounds of the Bazaar interview with Hank).

Anyway, Ken says:

“The PLS has one obsessive objective: to allow the user in every way possible to fit the learning around her own needs (rather than forcing her to conform to some outside requirements). In this sense, the PLS is consistent with Personal Learning Environments, and of course, with our own philosophy of learning on your terms. The lifelong learner simply has to have ownership/control of the learning. Perhaps the PLS would fit as a language learning toolkit within a PLE to enable that control.”

I am not so sure I like the term Personalised Learning System. But the idea makes a lot of sense in terms of using standards compliant and web 2 savvy learning provision which learners can access though the (mashup) Personal Learning Environment.

Lat week I was at the Scil Congress in St Gallen in Switzerland. The theme of the congress was ‘The changing face of learning – Creating the right balance’. I presented a keynote (slides to come soon on Slideshare) and ran a workshop on Personal Learning Environments. Not sure I got the timings quite right n the workshop – I got a bit carried away with the discussion. But the group certainly had got the idea. And as a last activity I asked them to make a quick podcast. I gave three groups 10 minutes to storyboard a four minute podcast on ‘The changing face of learning: the next steps’ and then we recorded it.
Only one had made a podcast before. But they did a pretty good job. I have done a very quick post production job. Here is the podcast – it is about twelve minutes in total.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

There are so many conferences at them moment it is hard to know what to go to. But this workshop is on a theme close to my heart and I have agreed to join the programme committee. Here is an abridged version of the call for papers.

“A change in perspective can be certified in the recent years to technology-enhanced learning research and development: More and more learning applications on the web are putting the learner centre stage, not the organisation. They empower learners with capabilities to customize and even construct their own personal learning environments (PLEs).

These PLEs typically consist of distributed web-applications and services that support system-spanning collaborative and  individual learning activities in formal as well as informal settings.

Technologically speaking, this shift manifests in a learning web where information is distributed across sites and activities can easily encompass the use of a greater number of pages and services offered through web-based learning applications. Mash-ups, the ‘frankensteining’ of software artefacts and data, have emerged to be the software development approach for these long-tail and perpetual-beta  niche markets. Core technologies facilitating this paradigm  shift are Ajax, javascript-based widget-collections, and
microformats that help to glue together public web APIs in individual applications.

In a wide range of European IST-funded research projects such as iCamp, LTfLL, LUISA, Palette, and TENcompetence a rising passion for these technologies can be identified.

This workshop therefore serves as a forum to bring together  researchers and developers from these projects and an open public that have an interest in understanding and engineering  mash-up personal learning environments (MUPPLEs).”

Can you resist a MUPPLE? Want to find out more? See http://mupple08.icamp.eu for more details.
TOPICS OF INTEREST (but not limited to):

* Architectures:
e.g. from cross-domain java scripting
up to to embedding of pedagogy

* Learning Models:
e.g. Activity Models, Environment
Design Models, including their theoretical bases

* Learning Services:
e.g. Concepts and Demonstrators for recombinable
learning services

* Authoring:
e.g. editors, user-interfaces for mash-up creation,
drag&drop mash-up creation, in-place editing

* Data formats:
e.g. microformats, new data models for
fragmented data such as streaming data, recombination models
needed to establish data interoperability

* User Interfaces:
Concepts, Metaphors, Workflows

* Mash-Up Strategies:
cooperative, value-chain oriented, master
and slave

* Development Methodologies: for building and sustaining communities
and services, including analyses of success factors, constraints,
characteristics of user uptake including long-tail requirements
engineering and software development

The European Commission funded Bazaar project was set up to look at the use of Open Source Software and Open Content in education. The project ended in December, 2007. As ever the work of compiling the reports and different outcomes of the project takes a little time after a project. One output is a new report “BAZAAR Project Scenario Papers “. This report is based on a scenario setting exercise and two workshops – one entitled How Dude -where’s my Data and the other on Personal Learning Environments. However the scenario setting exercise went further and included:

• Social Software, Tools and Content Creation
• OERs and the Culture of Sharing
• Interoperability and Metadata
• PLEs, e-Portfolios and Informal Learning
• Open Educational Resources
• Data Integrity and Storage

The report – which is 41 pages long – is attached below.

Here is an excerpt on short term scenarios for social software in education.

“These short term scenarios are a vision of a future that incorporates the use of social software for knowledge sharing, capability development and education and training delivery. They are presented in order to gauge an understanding of ‘how it could be’ if social software was more widely adopted by education practitioners. This future is very close!

Social software will force us to completely re-think our business and delivery models for many activities. It’s already happening in the media and many other industries from telecommunications to music and book-selling. Usage of social software is way beyond how people learn – it is about how organisations see themselves and how they do business.

Integral to the visions of the future is the realisation that the ‘Generation Y’ is a significant part of that future. They are already engaging with social software and making connections and sharing knowledge. The ‘Generation Y’ is a significant driver in the uptake of new technologies, along with business in its quest for efficiency. Organisations and education need to ‘catch up’.

The sense of urgency for change is perhaps being forced by the convergence of the changing nature of working and learning in a knowledge era and responding to the needs of the ‘Generation Y’. This generation are natural multi-taskers (or, at least, very good fast-switchers). They innately use technology to communicate within and outside of their working lives.”

I thoroughly recommend this report for anyone interested in social software, open source, open content and so on….

Download the scenarios report here.

This is a question which has bothered me for some time as I am involved in developmental projects for both e-Portfolios and Personal Learning Environments. And it could well be that there is little difference, depending on how both applications (or better put, learnng processes) are defined. Of course, if e-Portfolios are seen primarily as a vehicle for assessment then the differences are clear. Simililarly if the e-Portfolio is owned by an institution or course. But if the e-Portfolio is seen as being owned by the learner, is intended to record all learning and is seen as a tool for formative self evaluation and for reflection then the differnces become more fuzzy.

I have had a number of interesting discussions about this issue recently – with Jenny Hughes, Cristina Costa and Mark van Harmelen. Jenny (who loves working with words) talked about the difference between presenting knowledge and representing knowledge. I think this is a valuable distinction. An e-Portfolo is a` place for reflection, for  recognising learning and presneting that learning. A PLE may be seen as a tool (or set of tools) for not only presenting learning  but for also (individually or collectively) developing a representation of wider knowledge sets (ontologies?).

Of course it could be possible to develop a tool set which supports both tasks. But there are different sets of tools involved in those different prcesses and in the interests of si8mplicity and usability it may be better to develop environments which allow flexible access to such different tools or tool sets for different purposes.

Why am i wrestling with such obscure ideas? Pontydysgu is a partner in the EU funded Mature project. Part of our tasks is to research the ‘state of the art’ on these issues and to develop and test PLEs as a process for developing and sharing knowledge. Its going to be interesting.

I’m back on the road this week.

Tomorrow I head off to Karlsruhe for the launch of a new research project called Mature. “MATURE conceives individual learning processes to be interlinked (the output of a learning process is input to others) in a knowledge-maturing process in which knowledge changes in nature. This knowledge can take the form of classical content in varying degrees of maturity, but also involves tasks & processes or semantic structures. The goal of MATURE is to understand this maturing process better, based on empirical studies, and to build tools and services to reduce maturing barriers.”

I will be working on how Perosnal Learning Environments can be used as part of the knowledge maturing process. Could be a lot of fun.

And on Friday I head off to Pesero in Italy. On Saturday I will be running a workshop on social software, PLEs and e-Portfolios. The workshop is the last day of a five day course on Open and Distance Learning. There are five tutors on the course. We had a skype meeting to discuss what platforms we would use and as might be expected we all had different ideas. The first two days of the course are to be run using Dokeos. I had a try at setting up materials in this system. There is nothing wrong with Dokeos. I is a perfectly respectable Open Source Learning management System. But I just can’t get along with such systems. I guess I just find it too difficult to think in LMS structures. So, along with Cristina Costa, who is also teaching on the course, I set up a PBwiki, I was much happer with this. It is quick and flexible. And Cristina has extended it to include several Pageflakes mash-up pages.

I like this and will use the wiki for support material for presentations and workshops in the future. I will also use the wiki as part of the workshop for recording processes and outcomes. Everything is licensed under Creative Commons. So, if you want to reuse materials please feel free.

I guess I won’t have so much time for blogging this week. But I will try to post a couple of progress reports from the road.

plugin by rob

Terry Friedman is planning to publish a new version of the popular Coming of Age book.

And along with Leon Cych, he is planning a 24 hour telethon in which the contributors to Coming of Age are “on” for up to 20 minutes, either talking about their contribution or being interviewed about. I thought I would produce a short video (or slidecast) for the occasion. And by short I meant short. I always set out with good intentions but they always end up 25 minutes or more. I am proud of myself. This one is 6 minutes and I think it gets the key ideas across.

If you don’t like cartoon strips or prefer reading to watching a video or just want to find out more, you can download my contribution to the book below.

Coming of Age 2.0

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

Now we just need to try the system out!!

No posts for a while as have been constantly traveling. Since I am now on my way to Utrecht for the final conference of the Bazaar project on Open educational Resources then it seems pertinent to comment once more on the debate over the Capetown Declaration on Open Content. Despite the declaration being drafted in a restricted community – and official comment being similarly restricted – it is heartening to see that an open discussion has emerged through the blogosphere and within the open content com,unity. That the community is able to organise such a debate is very encouraging and a sign of the increasingly mature nature of the community.

Stephen Downes – in an email to the UNesco list server on OERs, says:

“I understand the purpose of the use of the word ‘libre’, as the words ‘open’ and ‘free’ have certainly been appropriated by those who see learning content as something ‘given’ and not ‘created’ or ‘used’. And one wonders what the supporters of commercial reproduction of open educational content would say were such reproduction required to retain the format and structure of the original – no proprietary technology, no encoding or access restrictions, no DRM. What would they say were they required to make available genuinely free and ‘libre’ content in whatever marketplace they offered their commercial version of such content.

I understand the concerns about the use of the word ‘libre’ as being unfamiliar and foreign to some people. Perhaps we could offer a translation. Perhaps we could call such content ‘liberty’ content. Alternatively, I would also support a move to reclaim the word ‘open’ from those who now interpret it to mean ‘produced’ and ‘commercial’ and ‘closed’. I have always referred to the concept simply as ‘free learning’.”

Stephen’s contribution reflects the findings of the Bazaar project. Firstly, it is not just a matter of ensuring a Creative Commons license is attached to resources – although awareness of such licenses is of course important. OERS have to be available in a form which renders them usable for learning. Part of that learning may involve changing those resources. Formats do matter.

Even more critical is support for the processes of learning. There are many great resources openly available on the internet and an increasing number of free social software applications which can potentially support learning.

But there remain many barriers to their effective use for learning. One of the issues we have focused on in the Bazaar project is data ownership. Yes, Facebook is a great application for peer and shared learning. But Facebook denies users access to their own data.

Equally organisation and institutional cultures of teaching and learning inhibit sharing and reuse.

In the Bazaar project we have spent some considerable efforts in looking at the potential of Personal Learning Environments. I suspect our reviewers from the Commission find this strange. Why should a project on Open Educational Resource be concerned about PLEs. The reason is because we share Stephen’s vision of I want and visualize and aspire toward a system of “society and learning where each person is able to rise to his or her fullest potential without social or financial encumberance, where they may express themselves fully and without reservation through art, writing, athletics, invention, or even through their avocations or lifestyle……..This to me is a society where knowledge and learning are public goods, freely created and shared, not hoarded or withheld in order to extract wealth or influence.”

We see Personal Learning Environments as an important development in enabling such a vision – allowing learners to create and allowing sharing of knowledge and ideas as well as artefacts.