The Wales-Wide Web

Back from a couple of days in Barcelona. I went there for a meeting f the European Commision funded MAFF projec t. MAFf is not really my scene - stands for Making Social Agenices Fit for the future. I don/t know a lot about social agencies - my role in the project is to develop a benchmarking tool for the project partners to test. But it was interesting to observe a different community of practice and to see what are their concerns and how they work together.

As ever it showed the problems of establishing shared meanings between people from different academic and disciplinary backgrounds, different languages, working in different systems and above all from different cultures. And it reinforced my belief we cannot transfer 'best practice' from one culture and system to another - but we can 'mutually learn' from another. Even more, working with people from a different system and culture provides insights into our own practice and reveals the assumptions that we operate in - what seems natural to us from one culture may not be in the least bit natural to someone from a different context.

It is also always a reality check to work with a community not so heavily into the learning technologies that dominate this blog and the community of practice around education technology. Great talk in the restaurant with Andreus - was trying to explain to him what a blog is and found my explanation totally inadequate!!

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But the highlight of the weekend was - as usual - the 'evening sessions'. Great evening out on Friday with Julia who I had met briefly at Learntec. We found we shared a lot of interests and came at learning from the same viewpoint. Once more forced to try to explain my ideas.
Tried to explain how a theoretical perspective based on communities of practice, Vygotskian pedagogic theories and ideas on innovation and organisational learning drawn from Nonaku and Konnu, amongst others, could be married together to provide a perspective on developing systems and architectures for learning and knowledge development using ICT. Will try to pursue this in the next few months using a wiki (have come to wikis a bit late but am in love with them at the moment). And more from Julia I hope - am setting her up with a blog.

Late night drink with Jen on Saturday. Usual mutual cursing of overwork and problems of working on two many projects - then just as I as saying I don't want to do any more projects on education systems and systems reforms she was saying she is not interested in any projects on learning and informal learning but liked the projects on education systems. So we tried to look at where our interests come together (or not).

I - along with many others on the Ed Tech bulletin blogs - tend to berate education systems for lack of pedagogic focus and for a managerial approach to learning which stifles individual creativity and exploration. She asked the obvious question of how I would organise learning systems - what polices and principles would I follow. There is a trite reply - I wouldn't start here - but her question is an important one. If the use of ICT is going to change learning as fundamentally as I think it will - then what will our education systems look like in the future. Jen's starting point - and I agree with her - is that the state has a role in providing a universal education serviced available for all (and free at point of use). Whilst I have tended to start from the point of individual learning she starts from this opposite end. Would like to explore the two approach further - would be worth trying to organise an event to bring together the policy people with the learning people and see if we can agree on what the future of education might look like in ten years time.

More on this later - am babysitting and the baby needs feeding! A quick last point though. Just as no elearning system is pedagogy free, neither is the organisation of learning systems, services and provision value or ideology free. As we develop a vision of how technology can be used to free learning, to engage and foster creativity - we also need to develop an ideology and value system which supports and reflects such a vision of pedagogy and learning.