The Wales-Wide Web

I've been traveling and in meetings for the last week. Was in Stuttgart last Wednesday for a seminar with IBM. Thursday I spoke at the European e-portfolio conference in Cambridge. Friday I met with members of the management team of the UK JISC e-Learning programme. The meetings together provided a fair reality check on where e-learning is at and where it is going, what are the issues and what we need to sort out. I have enough material for a series of posts over the next few days although whether I have the energy to write them is another question.

In this post I provide a summary of those issues, drawn from all of the meetings last week. Together I think they provide something of an agenda for work for the next few months:

1. An old issue this. With increasing access to information through the internet how do users and especially younger learners decide what information and knowledge is reliable and to be trusted. In the past, it was said at one of my meetings, this was through a process of scientific enquiry within the academic community. This is an extension of that old debate over whether Wikipedia is reliable and can be safely cited as an authority. Do we need new curricula in schools to deal with this question?

2. Another question form one of my sessions (and one that I get quite a lot). Why should anyone want to share their thoughts and ideas through social software and blogs? My friend Jenny argues she does not want her personal profile available to all on the web. Moreover, why should anyone want to read this stuff when they can access journals and other print materials which has been edited and reviewed?

3. A third issue is specific to my presentation on portfolios where, as regular readers of this blog will know, I have argued that there are seven (or more) different pedagogic processes in developing portfolios. One person asked whether it is really possible to divide such things as recording learning, reflecting on learning and presenting learning. I will certainly come back to this - I think I may need to refine my argument a little!

4. A recurrent them in many quick conversations was something like "Loved your presentation Graham. A real breadth of fresh air. I totally agree with what you say. But (and there always is a but after such nice comments) - how do I persuade my colleagues / boss / employers / clients to go down this road? They don't want to know about such experimental stuff. They just want to play it safe."

5. One eye opener to me was how little most people know about social software. At one of my presentation, where I conducted a couple of quick straw polls, only a third of the audience (who all worked in some context in information technology) had heard of blogs, few had heard of wikis (and if they had it was juts of wikipedia) and no-one knew what Web 2 was. A sharp reality check.

6. This for me is the big issue. the increasing use of ICt for learning is in the context of lifelong leaning and is leaner centred - driven often, as I have written before, by need to know or by self interest. Yet e-learning is predominantly being developed for and implemented by educational institutions within the education and training systems. There is a conflict in these two approaches. This is very apparent when you look at applications like Elgg or at the work Scott Wilson is doing on Personal Learning Environments, compared to existing and planned practice in the institutions. How do we resolve this tension. Personally, I think the education systems will have to change or will be in dire trouble - but I guess this is another post.

7. One emerging issue is different attitudes and approaches to privacy - and hence data security - in different countries and cultures. At the risk of stereotyping - in the Anglo Saxon cultures - we are more interested in the potential of data trace and ubiquitous computing than we are concerned at the risk to privacy. In mainland continental Europe - best epitomised perhaps by the Germanic cultures - concern over privacy overrides excitement at the potential of the new technologies.

8. I'm a bit out of my depth here. But it seems to me there is an emerging tension between 'lightweight' computing languages and architectures (e.g.REST, RSS, FOAF) - as used in web 2.0 approaches - and heavyweight standards (LISP, LOM etc) and languages - Java and C*. Can anyone help me out on this?

9. The last point on this list. many ICT training companies would like to get into the open source market. What is the potential in training clients in the use of open source. Can courses in Open Office replace the standard European Computer Driving License things like Word and Excel?

OK - thats all for now - I will try to write more about some of these issues in the next few days.

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