Everyday I get invitations to conferences. Most can only be called academic spam. You know the ones. Conferences you are not remotely interested in. Conferences with about 30 or 40 strands spanning the knowledge of the world. Conferences with a so called academic committee with around 50 members. Indeed I have even ended up on one or tow of those without my knowledge!

And then just occasionally I get something which leaps out at me. So it was when I received an email from John Traxler entitled “Call for Proposals: TEL, the Crisis and the Response. the workshop is being held at the Alpine Rendez-Vous (ARV) is ‘an established atypical scientific event’ focused on Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). The ARV series of events are promoted by TELEARC and EATEL associations.

The call for proposals is as follows.

Background

The TEL research community has undoubtedly been successful over the last fifteen or twenty years in extending, enriching and even challenging the practices and theories of education within its professions and within its institutions, and through them has engaged in turn with the institutions and professions of industry and government. These have however been largely inward-looking discourses best suited perhaps to a world characterised by stability, progress and growth. These are all now problematic and uncertain, and call for new discourses within the TEL research community and across its borders. The world is now increasingly characterised by challenges, disturbances and discontinuities that threaten these dominant notions of stability, progress and growth. These represent the grand challenges to the TEL research community, challenges to the community to stay relevant, responsive, rigorous and useful.

Earlier discussions (eg purpos/ed, http://purposed.org.uk/  & e4c, education-for-crisis, http://educationforthecrisis.wikispaces.com/) had outlined the emergent crisis in broad terms and identified different perspectives and components, including

• economic and resource crises, including long-term radical increases in economic inequality within nations; youth unemployment across Europe, the polarisation of employment and the decline in growth; sovereign debt defaults and banking failures; mineral and energy constraints;.
• environmental and demographic crises, in particular, the implications of declining land viability for migration patterns; refugee rights and military occupations; nation-state population growth and its implications for agriculture, infrastructure and transport
• the crisis of accountability, expressed in the failure of traditional representative democracy systems especially in the context of global markets, the growth of computerised share-dealing; the emergence of new private sector actors in public services; the growth of new mass participatory movements and the rise of unelected extremist minorities both challenging the legitimacy of the nation-state and its institutions
• socio-technical disruptions and instability, exaggerated by a reliance on non-human intelligence and large-scale systems of systems in finance, logistics and healthcare, and by the development of a data-rich culture;  the increasing concentration and centralisation of internet discourse in the walled gardens of social networks; the proliferation and complexity of digital divides;  the dependency of our educational institutions on computer systems for research, teaching, study, and knowledge transfer
• the dehumanisation crisis, expressed in the production of fear between people, the replacement of human flourishing with consumption, the replacement of the idea of the person with the idea of the system, the replacement of human contact with mediated exchange, the commodification of the person, education and the arts

and specifically, in relation to TEL;

• TEL and the industrialisation of education; marginal communities and the globalization and corporatisation of learning; futures thinking as a way to explore TEL in relation to resilience; the political economy of technology in higher education and technological responses to the crisis of capitalism; the role of openness as a driver for innovation, equity and access; digital literacies and their capacity to shift TEL beyond skills and employability in an increasingly turbulent future; connectedness and mobility as seemingly the defining characteristics of our societies; the role and responsibility of research and of higher education as these crises unfold, the complicity or ambiguity of TEL in their development; is the current TEL ecosystem and environment sustainable, is it sufficiently responsive and resilient, how extent does TEL research question, support, stimulate, challenge and provoke its host higher education sector?

TEL is at the intersection of technology and learning and encapsulates many of the ideals, problems and potential of both.  Education and technology permeate all of the perspectives outlined above, some more than others. It is possible however that they could ameliorate some of their consequences or amplify and exaggerate others. TEL has been a project and a community nurtured within the institutions and organisations of formal education in the recent decades of relative stability and prosperity in the developed nations of Asia-Pacific, North America and Western Europe. Some of the critical challenges directly relate to the perceived missions of the TEL project and its community. Contemporary formal education in schools, colleges and universities is increasingly reliant on TEL. The TEL community is however currently poorly equipped either to resist the progress of these crises today or to enable individuals and communities to flourish despite their consequences tomorrow. The transition movement, the open movement and the occupy movement are all parts of wider responses to differing perceptions and perspectives of the underlying malaise.

The Call

The proposed workshop will enrich conversations by bringing in new perspectives and will explore how the different communities can learn from each other, perhaps bringing about more open, participative and fluid models of education. It brings together researchers seeking to articulate these concerns and responses, and develop a shared understanding that will engage and inform the TEL community. It is timely, necessary and unique, and will contribute to a clearer and more worthwhile formulation of the Grand Challenges for TEL in the coming years.

One of the outputs of the workshop will be a special edition of a peer-reviewed journal; other options, such as an open access journal, a book or a website, are possible if there is a consensus.

Please submit an individual or collective two-page position paper, or propose a structured discussion or debate on the role and place of TEL in the light of our analysis. Contributions will be selected by the organisers on the basis of individual quality of the papers and the overall balance and coherence of the programme.

Proposals should be sent to John Traxler by 17 August.

I had a lot of fun in Koblenz last week. We have been experimenting for some time with different ways of using internet radio. And my old friend,  Andreas Auwärter, invited me to co-host a live radio internet radio programme as the conclusion to the tenth Koblenz e-Learning days conference on Wednesday 12 June. The programme focused on the current “Big Challenges,” in the field of media-supported learning.  What is our “… giant leap for mankind” for e-learning in the college in 2015 or 2020? It was supposed to build on an hour of group work to prepare the contents for the programme. To be honest I was unsure if an hour would be long enough. In the event the conference overran and there was only 15 minutes. But, to my pleasant surprise, the participants had worked their socks off in the 15 minutes available and came up with some wonderful and rich ideas which they explained in the programme.

You can listen to the programme here. A couple of interviews are in German, the majority in English.

Thaks to Andreas and to everyone who took part.

A geeky article in GeekWire notes that Facebook has downplayed the possibilities of future income from their mobile app. the reason being suggested in that users don’t like mobile apps. I think they are right. I have installed several apps because of the advertising.

And although I have pop ups blocked, I use search engines everyday on my desktop computer which provide advertising. The truth is I never see it. But on a mobile it is pretty hard to avoid. This has some pretty big implications, considering that the whole Web 2 and social software thing has been largely been financed by advertising.

A move back to paid for software and services could be a good thing. It is near to impossible for start up companies or small enterprises with a smart idea to develop a business plan. Indeed, most developers I have talked to just hope that their idea will catch on and one of the big companions will buy them. This doesn’t do much for innovation. Indeed big companies have a generally poor record when it comes to taking over innovatory start ups. Yahoo have managed somehow to run Flickr, perhaps the first really social application, into the ground. Google ended up closing down microblogging service Jaiku and I don’t hold any great hopes for the future of Posterous under Google stewardship.

Not only would a return to paid for applications and services allow a better chance for innovative start-ups to compete and to develop business models which allowed them to remain independent but it could allow the development of better privacy controls and quality. The argument that because a service if free, users have no rights is insidious, but without proper regulation is hard to counter.

And finally, it might get rid of all the advertising spam which pollutes the web.

Personally I am not a great fan of Google+, although as Google increasingly integrates its different services it is hard to avoid. But, as Stephen Downes points out in the ever valuable Oldaily, citing an original blog post by David Andrade, “by far and away the best thing about Google+ is the Hangout feature, essentially a way to have a videoconference with ten of your friends. This latest upgrade allows you to broadcast your Hangouts to as large an audience as you want. “With Hangouts on Air, you will be able to broadcast yourself publicly to the entire world, see how many viewers you have, and even record and reshare your broadcast. The public recording will be uploaded to your YouTube channel and to your original Google+ post.”

With free skype video calls limited to two people and the increasing cost of proprietary synchronous elearning platforms like Blackboard Collaborate, Hangouts could become the system of choice for open online courses.

This is a very neat presentation by Steve Warburton looking at the results of an empirical study on the benefits and downside of e-readers in higher education. First presented at the BILETA 2012 Conference.

Great idea from Angela Rees.

Angela says:

Purely because I thought it would be interesting and I don’t think it has been done already, I’m going to track my baby’s (and any other babies i can get my hands on!) developmental milestones – but rather than the block-stacking, finger-thumb-opposition kind I’m looking at the TV remote, mobile device, smart-phone, laptop sort of thing.

Now when I say track, I mean a mum style track, the occasional update when I get time off from scrubbing Weetabix off the wallpaper. I’m not obsessive enough to chart her daily progress and I don’t think that would be healthy for either of us.

To keep it interesting I’ll also blog about and review baby friendly apps and other baby techy stuff. If you know of something good or have something you’d like reviewing let me know. I’m a geek at heart!

I’d love to hear from anyone else who wants to share their baby’s technology milestones

I love all the gadgets, widgets and services that social software can provide us. Google Fusi9on table sis wonderful for sharing and displaying data. Dropbox shares my files with others (and across my devices). Google docs is great for co-authoring and crowd sourcing ideas. And then there are Flickr, Diigo, Slideshare, Youtube,  Vimeo and all the rest. I have lost track of how many accounts I have created.

But – are there thunderstorms building in the clouds. Google managed to wipe out my account earlier this year when it wrongly linked two accounts together. And today I have had no email due to the stuttering Apple iCloud (Apple claim this is only effecting less than 1 % of users – it just seems that everyone i know with an Apple cloud account is part of that 1%).

And even the wonderful WordPress.com proved an nonviable solution for a recent web site due to the restrictions on embed codes.

I don’t buy into the argument that because these services are (sometimes) free we cannot complain. In one way or another we are paying for these services – be it through a fee or advertising or whatever. Google and Apple don’t just give things away. The free accounts are tied into their business strategy and at the end of the day their balance sheets.

I read a blog by Doug Belshaw the other day who was trying only to use paid for services. I don’t think that is the answer – paid for data and services can be just as insecure or unreliable than free ones. Come to think of it – Apple’s .mac and .me (paid for) services were always flaky. For web sites, we already host install on our own servers. But saying our own we are merely renting those servers (and one of them is in the cloud). I really don’t want the hassle of running an email server – and certainly don’t want to operate a streaming server.

So I really don’t know the answer to this issue. I think you just have to make judgements on a case by case – app by app – basis of what best does the job and what seems to be a decent service and who is providing reasonable Terms and Conditions of servce.

I was at a meeting earlier this week discussing our ideas for a project using mobile devices for work based learning in the construction industry (see previous blog entry). We have emphasised the importance of interaction with physical objects in the workplace, which I think has generally been underestimated or even ignored in most elearning research and applications, at least outside the e-science domain.

We were asked whether the ideas we were putting forward were applicable to knowledge workers.

According to Wikipedia:

Knowledge workers in today’s workforceare individuals who are valued for their ability to act and communicate with knowledge within a specific subject area. They will often advance the overall understanding of that subject through focused analysis, design and/or development. They use research skills to define problems and to identify alternatives. Fueled by their expertise and insight, they work to solve those problems, in an effort to influence company decisions, priorities and strategies. What differentiates knowledge work from other forms of work is its primary task of “non-routine” problem solving that requires a combination of convergent, divergent, and creative thinking (Reinhardt et al., 2011).^[1] Also, despite the amount of research and literature on knowledge work there is yet to be a succinct definition of the term (Pyöriä, 2005)

I am not sure that the concept of knowledge workers is very helpful. In reality many jobs today are requiring research skills and non routine problem solving as well as creative thinking. And that goes well beyond people who spend most of their days working in front of a computer or what used to be called ‘white collar’ jobs.

Indeed one of the big issues in the building and construction industry appears to be rapidly increasing needs for higher levels of skills and knowledge, driven largely by new (and especially green) technologies and work processes. Traditional course based further training does not scale well – and may not be particularly effective when not linked to workplace practice.

Proving this ‘hypothesis’ is not so easy and of course leads us back to the issue of what constitutes knowledge in a work based context. But in November last year I attended a fascinating (at least to me 🙂 ) seminar hosted by the LLAKES project at the Institute of Education in London where Any Dickerson  discussed work undertaken for the UKCES on:

the development of a new and comprehensive set of detailed, multi-dimensional occupational skills profiles for the UK by combining the US-based Occupational Information Network (O*NET) system with the UK Standard Occupational Classification (SOC2010). This enables the multi-dimensional O*NET system to be used to generate comprehensive occupational skills profiles for the UK, providing a much more detailed depiction of skills utilisation, and changes in utilisation, than is currently available for the UK.

The project report “Developing occupational skills profiles for the UK : a feasibility study” provides detailed information about the methodology and findings. And I suspect, with a little more detailed analysis, it should be possible to draw some conclusions about changing skills and knowledge components in different occupations.

Why is this important? Obviously it has implications for economies and employment. But from the point of view of teaching and learning – and especially developing learning opportunities – we should be training for the future not the past or even the present. To do this we need a detailed understanding of what is happening in different occupations. And we need to get beyond policy rhetoric about the knowledge economy and knowledge workers.

Here at the Pontydysgu HQ we are still pretty excited about the potential of the Raspberry Pi computer (although we haven’t managed to lay our hands on one yet). If you want to find out more Eben, according to the Raspberry Pi blog, is hosting “a webinar with Element 14 on April 4 at 2pm GMT. The subject matter will suit beginners, and should be pretty interesting for those of you who are hardened hackers too. He’ll be showing you how to:

– download and install the Operating System on the SD card
– run the boot up script
– use the script editor and begin to create applications using the presupplied Python scripts

If you want to attend, you’ll need to sign up for the event at Element 14′s website.”

The debate over computer science, digital literacies etc. in the UK is still continuing. And the success of the Raspberry Pi computer – selling out of its first 70000 production run in under a week shows the demand and interest in coding and computers in general.

One driver of the debate is that employers are unhappy with the competence and knowledge of potential employees. But this is not new. Employers have always moaned that job applicants do not have the right skills, aptitudes, attitudes – whatever. And it is always the fault of the schools or universities. Maybe it is time that employers started thinking about their own role and responsibilities for training a future workforce. And that includes the IT industry. Of course curricula need updating. Learning how computers work is probably more of a democratic necessity rather than for employment or the economy. There is a danger that we evolve as a society of consumers essentially controlled by the technology of a few major corporations. You know who they are!

But just tweeking the school curriculum or weeding out production fodder university courses will not solve the problem. The real issue is how we view learning – how we create learning environments outside the classroom and how we value learning that takes place outside the formal education sector.

I like the following thoughtful comments from Chris Applegate on his blogpost ‘Why it’s not just about teaching kids to code‘

Secondly, there’s a spectrum of challenges, but there’s also a spectrum of solutions. It’s not just schools and universities that need to bear the burden. As I said, coding is a practice. There’s only so much that can be taught; an incredible amount of my knowledge comes from experience. Practical projects and exercises in school or university are essential, but from my experience, none of that can beat having to do it for real. Whether it’s for a living, or in your spare time (coding your own site, or taking part in an Open Source project), the moment your code is being used in the real world and real people are bitching about it or praising it, you get a better appreciation of what the task involves.

So it’s not just universities and schools that need to improve their schooling if we want to produce better coders. Employers should take a more open-minded approach to training staff to code – those that are keen and capable – even if it’s not part of their core competence. Technology providers should make it easier to code on their computers and operating systems out-of-the-box. Geeks need to be more open-minded and accommodating to interested beginners, and to build more approachable tools like Codecademy. Culturally, we need to be treat coding less like some dark art or the preserve of a select few.