Interesting presentation by Scott Wilson. Scott says: “I think the main difference between how I see the world of devices interacting in education and some of the articles I’ve seen recently is that I assume that most of these devices are personal technologies – and because of that they will always be heterogeneous…..So the challenge for education is providing resources and activities in an open and flexible way that will work – at least in some fashion – on any device.”

I find it hard to get excited by the mergers takeovers buyouts flotations and so on of the corporate computer world. But I am interested in the take over of Skype by Microsoft. Why? Because Skype is one of my key communication tools. And I certainly would not want to see it merged as part of the already over-bloated Office suite. Furthermore I do not have an X Box so the idea of integration with the MS gaming machine holds little out for me. Nor do I see myself getting a windows 7 phone even if it does have Skype integrated.

Generally it seems that when big corporations be it Microsoft Apple Google or Yahoo take over these products they at best stagnate. The original developer teams move on to new projects while the large companies struggle to integrate their acquisitions within their present offerings. And I think this is likely to happen to Skype. Microsoft have paid a huge sum to buy a loss making service and will probably spend the first year puzzling over how they might make some money out of it. Technical development will stagnate. Indeed even before the sale the release of Skype 5 is a dubious advance over previous versions (nobody seems to be able to find the toggle swicth between views in the new interface). In fact I suspect the driving rationale behind the Skype 5 redesign was an attempt to get people to pay for video conferencing. I haven’t (although I do pay for calls to landlines and mobiles) and I think I only know one person who has paid.

I suspect one of the reasons  that the paid for video has failed to take off is because it is only really useful if everyone else has got it. That is important. There are other competing services to Skype and it is a fair bet to guess that better competing services will emerge in the near future. Of course they too are going to have the problem of working out how to make any money out of the provision of what people have come to expect as a free service. But once more these services will only become useful if enough people adapt them – in other words if they achieve critical mass. And I have seen little convincing research into how social software services gain the viral take off to gain such mass – especially in the small business and academic research worlds.

Of course one answer would be a move to standards based communication platforms where one service could connect with another. But I don’t see that happening any day soon. So I suspect we are stuck with Skype in the foreseeable future and just have to hope Microsoft are kind to it.

The second verse of the great Pete Seeger song ‘Little Boxes‘, written by Malvina Reynolds goes:

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And of course it is true. More than that, it is the policy on which most of our careers guidance practice is based. Find what skills industry and commerce needs, goes the policy, set up training places to meet those needs, put people into those boxes and we will turn out a neat match between skills and the needs of the economy.The strategy is called ‘skills matching’ and forms the basis for the European New Skills, New Jobs policy as well as that of many national governments.

Universities traditionally stood aloof from such a policy which they saw only as applicable to those in vocational education and training. Univeristy was about the development fo minds and about research.

But with the increasing commodification of universities, they too are embracing such a strategy, in the name of value for money and employability. Students are reluctant to part with large sums of money unless they can see a job progression route for their expenditure on a degree course; governments regard vocational relevance as the key criteria in providing fiances for higher education.

The only problem is that the ‘Little Boxes’ approach doesn’t work. Firstly employers often don’t know what skills they want. take the fiasco at the end of the last century when the European Industry Group for Information and Communication Technologies was predicting huge skills gaps in computing and computer programming. These gaps never materialized despite little growth in the supply to computer programmers. Secondly we simply do not have sufficiently well developed central planning infrastructures to plan for skills and employment in such a way.

This is not to deny the needs for close community links between employers and education providers, at least on a local level. However this should not be to the detriment of other community interests in education and community well being. And rather than focus on skills matching, it would be far better to focus attention on creativity and innovation. If we look at regional innovation centres in Europe such as the manufacturing clusters in Emilia Romana or the media cluster in Cardiff it could be argued that such growth happened due to innovation around the skills and creativity of the workforce, rather than because of matching of skills to existing industry (indeed in Cardiff’s case the economy was traditionally based on heavy industry and manufacturing).

In any case is it possible to ‘predict’ the skills needed int he economy in a period of fast technological change? The Institut Technik und Bildung at Bremen University, with whom I have worked for many years used to talk of the ‘shaping’ principle. They saw education as playing a key role in shaping work organisation and skills development as enabling social innovation in production and economic development. The word ‘shaping’ is a translation of the German ‘Gestaltung’, also commonly translated as ‘design’. And once more this would suggest we can design our futures, that technology and production are not mechanistically determined but rather can be shaped or changed.

But for such an approach we need people who can think out of the box, who can consider the social implications of technology development. And that will not happen through a skills matching policy!

It is not often I write about hardware. There are quite enough web sites for that already. But, I am greatly saddened to read of the demise of the Flip camera. I have three of these excellent cameras and regularly use them in workshops and events. They are lightweight and robust. But most importantly they are extremely easy to use. I can teach someone who has never used a video camera before how to use a Flip and download the content in about 3 minutes. And that frees them up to think about the content and pedagogy, rather than worrying about their technical proficiency.

So why has Cisco decided to stop manufacturing the Flip. It is profitable, albeit with a falling volume of sales. The answer it seems is that with the rising use of mobile phones for filming and uploading video content, Cisco do not see a long term future for the Flip.

Last week I wrote in the editorial how I saw no future for dedicated educati0nal technology. But perhaps I was wrong. Even if mobiles do have advanced video capacity, for teaching and learning they are no competitors to the Flip. Biut it seems the educational market is too small and insignificant for manufacturers such as Cisco.

In a reply to my post last week on Donald Clark’s article about ePortfolios Ben Werdmuller said “From reflection, to privacy, to institutional feedback and portability, these are all things that the wider web is working on, and it makes no sense at all for the elearning sector to be tackling them on their own – except for the worst kind of closed business motivations.” And I think he is right.

For some time now I have been questioning the idea of educational technology – of technology development specifically focused on education. That is not to say there is no place for research on the use of technology for learning – nor of implementation of insubstantiations of technology specifically in a learning context. But the educational technology community can only be the poorer for developing ideas and applications based on use cases posited in a silo – outside of the rest of the world.

Indeed, I would suggest that the reason this came about was because of a focus on control and management of learning – and thus on replicating and reinforcing institutional practices, rather than supporting the learning process itself. Whilst institutional practice may be quite particular and confined to the educational sector, learning processes take place throughout society. If we start designing for learning, their is nothing in the use cases of those designs which separates them from the home or from work or the wider community.

And if we take our main focus as design for learning, then we have a far greater chance of developing technologies which can transform learning, rather than reinforcing the class and technology divides which inhibit access to education.

Yesterday the UK Telegraph and  News of the World newspapers reported that minister of education Michael Gove had announced plans to ban mobile phones from school classrooms from September 2011. This would form part of  government guidance to schools due to be published in July 2011.

Whether such reports are true or not are open to considerable doubt. It seems more likely that Give will give powers to schools to ban phones although they probably could do so anyway. What is in no doubt is Gove’s belief in a very traditional idea of education and his skepticism (or non understanding) of the potential of technology for learning. One of the coalition government’s first acts was to abolish the BECTA support agency for technology in education.

And Gove is proposing giving powers to teachers to confiscate phones form students and search their text messages although it would seem possible that this would be struck down by the European Court of Human Rights.

Anyway as the Telegraph article circulated by Twitter there was a quick reaction from the education community with a Google doc based petition being set up within two hours:

We, the undersigned, believe that such a ban would scupper successful mobile learning initiatives and is a short-sighted, reactionary move. We call for a mobile phone ban to be removed from any guidance published by the DfE.

The petition contains a comments column and elicited many interesting replies.

Danielle Bayes, a teacher, reflected the views of many saying:

Banning mobile devices won’t go any way to helping students understand how to use them appropriately and to their advantage. And for every negative news story concerning mobiles in schools, where is the publicity for the hundreds of thousands of children who are innovators of their time and creatively use them to further their learning?

Hilary Curtis added a parent’s perspective

I expect/require my son to take his phone to school, so that he can let me know if he has chosen to go to the park or a friend’s house afterwards.  This is an important element of teaching him safety and responsibility.  The only safe place for him to keep it at school is in his bag, which means it is with him in class, although he is quite properly not allowed to use it then (though I agree with other comments that there could be planned educational use of phones too).  Schools already have perfectly adequate powers to set their own rules in such matters.

Deputy Headteacher Steve Philp said:

This is just a way of discriminating against the poor. At my school (50% FSM within top 20% deprivation); most parents communicate using mobile phones – it is their way of accessing the internet and information. We are exploring ways of bringing mobile technology into the classroom to increase the links between all our stakeholders (parents, governors, staff and students particularly) and this ban will just disenfranchise students and parents, de-skill teachers and alienate governors.

And Ewen McIntosh reflected the comments of many in that modern technologies cannot be ignored in education:

The problem is not with the device, in the same way that it is not paper that is fault for those writing hateful remarks in books, or in racist pamphlets.

The problem is one of attitudes towards students’ ability, wherever they are, to communicate in private. The attitude of students can be a negative one. But it is the attitude of parents, teachers, school leaders and Governors, that allows us to take negative attitudes and practices, and educate youngsters in the huge potential these devices have for their learning and participation in the democratic process.

Mobile phone use is a crucial part of today’s information architecture, for understanding the world around us and having one’s say in it. To remove it from the principle place of learning is equivalent to removing books in the 16-19th century, televisions and overhead projectors in the 20th century, and the internet in the beginning of the 21st century.

The list continues to grow. It is encouraging that many of the signatures are from teachers and school leaders as well as researchers and developers. But it also poses a question of how a space and discussion opened up in response to reported government policy initiatives can be transformed into a longer term and positive campaign and space for exploring ideas and innovation in technology and pedagogy..

It is always sad when lovers break up. especially close lovers with a growing relationship who suddenly fall out with each other. And the educational technology community has certainly has a long love in with Twitter. Twitter for teaching, Twitter for learning, Twitter for developing projects, twitter for maintaining communities and twitter just for nattering with each other. But I foresee a more tempestuous relationship ahead. Why? As the Guardian newspaper reports: “Twitter has amazed and outraged developers by warning them that it will severely curtail their ability to build apps that use its output.” The Guardian quotes Ryan Sarver, the head of platform and API at Twitter as saying:

Twitter will provide the primary mainstream consumer client experience on phones, computers, and other devices by which millions of people access Twitter content (tweets, trends, profiles, etc), and send tweets. If there are too many ways to use Twitter that are inconsistent with one another, we risk diffusing the user experience.

It was just because Twitter opened up its API to third party developers and applications which led to such rapid innovation and experimentation – in education as much as elsewhere. This looks to be over. Sarver might claim this is due to the desire to guarantee the user experience but few will believe that. fairly obviously Twitter want to make money out of their loss making application.  I suspect it is not so much apps they want to make money out of but advertising. and to control advertising they want to control the app market.

As Dave Winer (who has seen all this a few times before) says: “The Internet remains the best place to develop because it is the Platform With No Platform Vendor.” Winer goes on to say:

Facebook may have a huge installed base, but it’s dead to me. I can’t get there. The platform vendor is too active. Same with Twitter, same with Apple. Give me a void, something I can develop for, where I can follow the idea where ever it leads. Maybe there are only a few thousand users. Maybe only a few million. Hey, you can’t be friends with everyone.

And that I guess is the lesson for education. Follow our ideas. See where they lead. Don’t worry about how many users there are. And above all lets work on the platform with no vendor. Education is a public good, not a vendor platform.

But it was good whilst it lasted, Twitter.

An important article in the Guardian newspaper entitled “The awful truth: education won’t start the west getting poorer”. The article challenges a number of assertions which seem to have become accepted ‘facts’ over the last few years.

Anyone who has written proposals for the European Commission will know the mantra of the Lisbon Agreement. By the year 2010 Europe will be the most advanced knowledge economy of the year. Now quietly forgotten , this bombastic policy goal was based on a number of unproved assumptions. First was the nature of the economy itself. Yes, we may have a greater proportion of knowledge as capital in the production process than in previous times and the numbers involved in service industries have increased but the capitalist economies remain relaint on production as the primary source of wealth and indeed of employment.

And whilst the number of occupations and jobs requiring higher skills and knowledge levels has increased, there remain many low skilled jobs, especially in the growing services sector.

There were two main ways Europe was to achieve its preeminent status in world economies. The first was through implementing ever higher levels of technology. Once more the link between technology, productivity and economic growth are contestable and difficult to measure. technology can increase productivity and lead to growth. however, there have been a number fo studies showing that the implementation of new technologies has actually reduced productivity, at least in the short term. And if technology merely reduces the workforce, this can inhibit economic growth and stability.

There has also been a long running assumption that higher levevls of education and qualification will also lead to higher productivity and higher wage levels. Botha re unproven. And as the data quoted in the Guardian shows real wage levels in teh UK are actually falling.

In fact it is some of those occupations lauded as the jobs of the future that pay rates have fallen most dramatically in comparative terms. Computer programmers pay has been steadily falling for the last five years in the UK.

The Guardian also points out how so called knowledge jobs are being deskilled “They are being chopped up, codified and digitised. Every high street once had bank managers who used their discretion and local knowledge to decide which customers should receive loans. Now software does the job. Human judgment is reduced to a minimum, which explains why loan applicants are often denied because of some tiny, long-forgotten overdue payment.”

The Guardian quotes Brown, Lauder and Ashton who call this “digital Taylorism”, after Frederick Winslow Taylor who invented “scientific management” to improve industrial efficiency.”

And of course with Globalisation and new forms of communciation many of these jobs are simply being shifted or outsourced to workers in other countries, especially to lower wage economies. At the same time, countries such as India and China are rapidly expanding their education systems, with a dramatic growth in science and technology graduates.

In many ways this is a perfect storm, hence the title of the Guardian article. it certaibly adds focrce to teh growing debate about the Purpose of Education abd challenges the idea that educations hould merely focus on so called employability skills. Secondly it may lead us to rethink what sort of jobs we want in society? I am interested in the survival of the craft sector in gemrany, depsite the assumption in the UK that such jobs had no future. Indeed its eems that thsoe countries with strong apprenticeship systems, valuaing handicraft and applied skills and knowledge may be better placed for the future than thiose such as UK which went down the road of developing a mass higher education system for the knowledge society.

I spent most of the weekend clearing up my office. It was one of those jobs which starts out as a small thing – I had just run out of shelf space and ends up as a major spring cleaning operation. The biggest job was throwing out paper – bags full of it. What was all this paper? Most of it was photo copies or print outs of various academic papers and reports. there must have been hundreds. And to my surprise I realized that I had read or at least flicked through mots of them at one time or another in the past. But certainly not lately. I would not have had a clue where to find any of them, even if I remembered I had them. So why did I photocopy and print so much. Is it that in those days I did more academic research and now work more on development projects? I don’t think so. Or is it that the internet is dumbing us down? Do I spend all my days following tweets rather than reading anything serious. Although I don’t subscribe to the dumbing down thesis there certainly are changes in the way we access knowledge. I originally intended to write a short blog reflecting on my clean up. but the ideas have grown so here is the introduction to what I guess will be a mini series this week about how we are using technology for research and knowledge sharing.

I am old enough to remember card index files as the way of searching for books and papers in the Swansea University library when I was a student. And much later, when I was appointed as a researcher at the University of Bremen, I used to travel to the UK to photocopy papers in the University of Surrey library (this was the nearest university library to Gatwirk and thank goodness, there were no Ryan Air type weight restrictions).

Why not access on line resources? Because quite simply even 15 years ago there were few research resources available online. of course that has rapidly changed. Even with the annoyance of DRM restrictions, it is usually fairly easy to access research papers and outputs, even in smaller research areas.

One of the other big changes we tend to forget is search. In 1995 search engines were fairly rudimentary. However we may moan about them, we now have choice of a wide range of pretty good search engines  and with persistence can usually find what we are looking for online.

Other changes? Ubiquitous, or near ubiquitous access. Most researchers, at least in the richer industrialized countries are online most of the time. And one of the big changes, at least in explaining why I had so much paper stored, is improvements in screen technology. Nowadays we even try to read documents on handheld devices. Even five or six years ago screens were small and lacked the resolution to make reading a comfortable experience. So we printed everything. I would go to the university to sue their fast laser printer to print collections of papers I had downloaded at home for the internet.

In this blog I have focused mainly on the change sin technology and how they impact on research. In the next entry I will look more at  socio technical changes and in particular at social software and changing research practice.

Pontydysgu is sponsoring the Mobile learning: Crossing Boundaries in Convergent Environments 2011 conference being held in Bremen on March 21 – 22. And as I did with the PLE2010 Conference last year, I will be writing the occasional bog about how we are organising the conference and why.

We held a meeting of the organising committee today. The committee is small, Klaus Rummler, Judith Seipold, Eileen Luebcke and myself. The advantage of such a small group is that meetings are informal (and generally productive) and we can all meet face to face. The disadvantage, of course, is that there are not many people to do all the work. Informal is key for me. Long gone re the days when conferences could only be organised by the great and the good, and organising committees were full of Professors with many letters after t5heir name. This is one of the democratising effects of social media. In the past it was necessary to have such grand committees in order to get word out of an event. Now we use twitter and facebook and viral info0rmation flows. In additio0n I think researchers are changing their attitudes towards events. In the past it was the authority of the organisation running the vent which was key – were they and their organising committee respected academics with many publications to their name. Now people are more interested in the subject of the conference and on the possibilities for fruitful exchange of ideas and knowledge.

Of course there remain issues. It is often difficult for researchers – and especially students – to get funding to attend a conference. for that reason we have tried to make the event as cheap as possible. We are only charging 50 Euros, and even though we have no sponsorship, we are confident we can break even. I was disappointed last year that the conference on Open education in Barcelona was charging something like 500 Euros to attend.

We rely on the goodwill and input of the community to organise the event. The hardest job is reviewing. We are sending all of the submissions for the conference to two reviewers. With something like 50 submissions that means 100 reviews. the open source Easychair system helps in organising this but is by no means perfect. And I remain sceptical about how review systems work. However clear the instructions, different reviewers seem to have very different perceptions of submissions. however, I have no ideas of a better system for quality. And at the end of the day, the success of the event depends on the quality of the inputs.

One of the more bizarre problems in organising such events is collecting the mo0ney. It is extremely hard to get systems for universities to accept money in (and often just as hard to get the money out again. Furthermore, an overview of who has paid is vital and university finance systems are rarely geared to providing such information on demand. however Paypal makes setting up your own payments system fairly easy.

We started  talking about the programme design today. One thing we are keen to do is to separate between the submission of a high quality research paper and the traditional academic form of presentation. Endless paper presentations do not stimulate discourse and ideas, and seldom lead to the generation of new knowledge. Thus we are looking at different forms of presentations, including cafe type sessions and debates. It is also very heartening that we have received some excellent proposals for workshops with real interaction with participants. And once we have got an outline programme we will be looking at add different unconferencing sessions.

Submissions for the conference officially closed last Friday. But if you do want to make a last minute proposal email it to me by Sunday. But even if you haven’t got a proposal in their will be plenty of ways to participate. Hope to see many of you in Bremen in March