The Wales-Wide Web

Have been in Brussels for for one and a half hour seminar on 'Enhancing skills in SMEs - Is e-learning an answer". The seminar was been organised by the European Commission Leonardo da Vinci programme and brought together people form about fourteen different countries. Most of the participants were promoters of European projects concerned with e-learning in SMEs to a greater or lesser extent. Additionally there were representatives of the National Coordination Units for the Leonardo programme and from the European Commission.

In next two days I will post a report on the meeting. In the meantime my presentation to the seminar is attached in PDF format. If anyone would like a copy in a different f

ormat please contact me.

In Brussels for one and a half hour seminar on 'Enhancing skills in SMEs - Is e-learning an answer. The seminar was been organised by the European Commission Leonardo da Vinci programme and brings together people form about fourteen different countries. Most of the participants were promoters of European projects concerned with e-learning in SMEs to a greater or lesser extent. Additionally there were representatives of the National coordination Units for the Leonardo programme and from the European Commission.

In the next two days I will post a report on the seminar. In the meantime here is a PDF version of my presentation. If you would like a copy in another format please contact me.

At the workshop in Brussels, I met a number of people who shared my interests in ICT, learning and football. Since they said they were going to look at the blog, I'm posting an article I have wrote with Lars Heinemann for the welsh radical newspaper, Seren.

I am a football fan. I started out at the age of six as a Swindon Town Fan in the old third division At first I have a foldings tool to stand on and when I got bigger my father nailed two paint cans onto a plank of wood so I could see from the terraces. When I was a bit bigger still I used to go down to the County Ground three hours before kick off to secure myself one of the precious places on the railings at the front.

This is the first of a series of short posts on ideas coming out of the seminar in Brussels on "Enhancing Skills in SMEs - is e-learning an answer?".

One thing most people in the seminar were agreed upon was that e-learning is not happening in Small and Medium Enterprises. there was general agreement also that a major reason was the lack of a training culture in small enterprises and a subsequent lack of infrastructure and skills to initiate training programmes.

There was less unanimity on what to do about it.

Just a quick note about Google Scholar - the recently released search engine for academic research.

I am not sure how good it is - the returns still seem to be changing and growing. Google Scholar will revolutionise research and within a few months be used by 90% of academic round the world.

More important from my point of view is that it shows the potential power of distributed and associated metadata. We need something like this for e-learning materials - able to aggregate data on materials use in practice.

This would overcome the present problem when to be standards compliant materials developers are required to fill in endless metadata fields.

Last week I was in Munich for the kick off meeting of a new European project called ICOVET. ICOVET is looking at informal or non formal learning for socially disadvantaged young people. The aim is that through making competencies visible it may be possible to develop self confidence and esteem and to provide new opportunities in terms of accessing employment or formal learning.

Whilst the idea is simple there are many issues which need sorting out - for example -

• Soft validation or hard testing - methods and standards

• For whom - for learner or for prospective employers or training institutions

• Making competencies visable for formal training system or making visible to be used for more formal or informal personal learning

• How do we define disadvantaged young people

• What is non traditional learning - non intentional or informal learning?

One thing that we have to develop is a model of learning and knowledge which includes different types of competencies other than those gained in formal learning situations. For this we agreed to adopt the 'Starfish Model' - developed through previous projects - 'Tacit / Key' and 'Self Evaluation'. I am building a web site which will provide access to the work of these projects. In the meantime I am posting two papers - one by Karen Evans and Natasha Kersh from the Institute of Education in London on their work in the self evaluation project and a second - much older and somewhat academic paper on different types of knowledge which I wrote for a project on the training of teachers and trainers.

If you have any comments on these papers just use the Discussion link below this posting.

PaperECER-Self-evaluation.doc
FNLCH8-1.doc

Lots of useful information on Google Scholar on this Open Access Content site. The major point the author makes is the potential of Scholar and other future similar services to gain visibility for Open Access Content. Note the request below.

Suber, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, 12/2/04

Please take steps to make sure that your literature (OA and non-OA) is indexed in GS. Getting Google to index your work costs you nothing but a little time, is non-exclusive, and can only help your visibility and impact. Authors and publishers can arrange for indexing by contacting GS at . Authors: it looks like GS will index journals and repositories before it indexes personal web sites. Publishers: GS will index non-OA content only if you provide OA at least to abstracts.

Guardian Unlimited Football | Special Reports | Irony not lost on Dortmund:
Question: What do you call a football team which regularly attracts crowds of more than 75,000, yet currently suffers from a financial crisis unparallelled across Europe?

Answer: Borussia Dortmund

Following up on previous postings on the German football scene, this Guardian article provides a useful analysis of Dortmund's decline.

Problem is many of the so called communities have little to bind them together - other than that as individuals they have all joined an on-line community. But they do not 'know' each other - neither do they usually work together on a collective task.

The projects do meet together - usually two or three times a year and do have a series of collective work tasks. The projects also are more or less expected to maintain a web site which may or may not include group-ware tools, bulletin boards etc. The problem is that the project are frequently too small to develop any real community.

The answer - I think - is to encourage clusters of projects to share common community portals. These clusters which obviously need some areas of commonality in their work - could then focus the public areas on the services and tools their projects are producing - whilst economies of scale should allow the deployment of reasonably sophisticated communication environments for project development.

Seems a win win situation to me. I am going to try to get two projects I work with to develop this idea. The first is the Self evaluation project for which I have just launched a new web site. The second is the new Leonardo da Vinci ICOVET project which is looking at the assessment of non formal learning for socially disadvantaged young people

My friend Lars Heinemann is translating a document called " Guidelines for Emergent E-Competences for Schools", from English to German. The document has been produced by the European Commission funded I-Curriculum project.

One of the central ideas behind the project is the emergence of new forms of digital literacy. That term is hard to translate. There are two possible translations - each reflecting the different poles in an increasingly contended concept. The old idea behind digital literacy was the ability to use computers - as encompassed in the much used European Computer Driving License. In German that seems to be translated as "Digital Kentnisse". I have written before on the narrowness of such a concept and the ned to extend our understandings of Digital literacy to dealing with judging information and to using ICT creatively to produce new ideas and products. That use of the term would seem to be more encompassed by the German term "Digital Bildung" (more on the Bildung word in a future entry).

Would welcome comments from any German speakers.

The first post is from Jurgen Werner who says: "It seems to me, as if there was no direct translation of the term. fairly obvious that it is more than literacy. So I would say it is the (web) user's capacity to evaluate information available on the internet (he finds on the internet) and to generate relevant knowledge from this information. In romantic terms it is the skill which enables the user to distinguish right from wrong, or important from rubbish.

My suggestion for translation into German is 'Netzkompetenz'".

Thanks Werner.

Second post is from Daniela Reimann. She says: "There is no such term 'Digitalkenntnisse', neither is there "Digital-Bildung'. (It would indicate that the education and the skills would be somehow "digital", but it is the characterictic of the medium which is digital. The term of the mid 90s in German would be 'Computeranwenderkenntnisse' ('computer applying skills or computer literacy) or what we called 'Medienkompetenz in der Informationsgesellschaft' in our previous BLK-model project ArtDeCom. The latter means a simple familarity with a machine that computes (see our paper 'Gaining Computational Literacy by Creating Hybrid Aesthetic Learning Spaces' - in: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (IEEE ICALT) Athen, 2003.)

I use the term '(asthetisch-informatische) Medienbildung' (media education, media literacy) which implies the issue of shaping as well as an understanding of the algorithmic machine and informatic models, rather than the German term of 'Medienkompetenz' which is stressed in the discussion without clear definition. ('Competence' in German fits with the UK term of skills rather than with 'competence'). The term of 'Medienkompetenz' stems originally from media pedagogy (of the 70s focoussing on film/cinema and Tele as well as other mass media."

Interesting indeed. Until we get this reply / comment button working please feel free to email me on attwell@uni-bremen.de and I will make sure your views published here.

Willi Petersen says "in my opinion the meaning of 'Digital Literacy' is more or less the same like 'Basic ICT skills' or 'ICT literacy' or 'e-literacy': In addition to literacy the ability to use information and communication technology (ICT) for basic tasks in the information society or e.g. as a tool for learning proficiently.

And in german: 'digitale Kompetenz' oder 'Informationskompetenz' oder auch 'Multimediakompetenz'. In Ergänzung zur Lese- und Schreibfertigkeit die Fähigkeit, IKT-Technologien für einfache Aufgaben des Lebens in der Informationsgesellschaft oder z.B. zum Lernen erfolgreich zu nutzen und einzusetzen.

Therefore there is a difference between 'Digital Literacy' and "ICT user skills" in the context of occupation.

In our discussions we defined:

The term e-skills covers mainly three categories (*):

• ICT practitioner skills: The capabilities required for researching, developing and designing, managing, the producing, consulting, marketing and selling, the integrating, installing and administrating, the maintaining, supporting and service of ICT systems;

• ICT user skills: the capabilities required for effective application of ICT systems and devices by the individual. ICT users do apply systems as tools in support of their own work, which is, in most cases, not ICT. User skills cover the utilisation of common generic software tools and the use of specialised tools supporting business functions within industries other than the ICT industry;

• e-Business skills: the capabilities needed to exploit opportunities provided by ICT, notably the Internet, to ensure more efficient and effective performance of different types of organisations, to explore possibilities for new ways of conducting business and organisational processes, and to establish new businesses.

(*) There are certain overlaps between these categories, but each has sufficient independent core significance to justify its separate consideration. Within each of them there are a number of levels of capability. These levels are occupational skill levels required by employers and not merely levels of initial academic or vocational education or qualifications. The word “user” is sometimes mentioned in relation both to individuals and industries/organisations, and these need to be distinguished.

((cf. The European e-skills forum: E-skills for Europe: towards 2010 and beyond (synthesis report). Brussels: European Commission - Enterprise and Industry Directorate-General, 2004)

> The second reply comes from Gerald Heidegger and Wiebke Petersen who say: "Usually the term means just 'Knowledge of the use of PC´s' ('PC-Kenntnisse') which includes knowledge of software which is often specified, e. g. in ads for employment. The creative use you are writing about is certainly important but is normally not referred to. Overall in Germany people do not believe so much in the creative possibilities of computers. Often it is still called 'calculator' (Rechner). 'Digital-Kenntnisse' is no German word or concept.

Interview on policies for the use of ICT for learning in SMES with Barry Nyhan, Cedefop.

Name: Barry Nyhan

What is your job title?
Researcher in European vocational education and training

What are your overall responsibilities?

I am responsible for the development of the Cedefop Research Arena (Cedra). Cedra, established in 2000, supports research cooperation in the fields of vocational education and training (VET) and human resource development (HRD). It facilitates communication and contributes to community building among European researchers. The concept of partnerships and networks for sharing resources and developing knowledge is central to Cedra. Cedra carries out its activities in close collaboration with its partners.

Cedra has three strands:

1. Sharing research information via the 'European Research Overview' (ERO)
2. Promoting knowledge development mainly dealing with the theme 'work-related learning'
3. Fostering new research methodologies for the knowledge society

What are your responsibilities in relation to ICT and SMEs?

Barry Nyhan was responsible for the Cedefop ICT and SME project, a short research project undertaken in five European countries, which resulted in the publication of ‘E-learning in Small and Medium Enterprises in Europe: the challenge for policies and practice’.

He is a specialist in research into the learning organisation and the learning region, having published many papers and books in this field. Much of this research involves looking at learning in Small and Medium Enterprises.

What measures is your agency taking with regard to ICT and SMEs?

Cedefop is responsible for research and development activities in vocational education and training. This work includes projects on:

The development of e-skills in SMEs including the development of a typology of e-skills
Skills and qualifications for SMEs in the international market
Research into learning organisations
Research into the learning region

What measures is your agency / organisation taking with regard to e-learning?

Cedefop has taken a considerable number of initiatives with regard to e-learning. These include developing services and activities, such as opportunities in e-learning, surveys, general information, a news centre, and daily issues in electronic learning.

What do you think are the main barriers to the use of ICT technologies in SMEs?

The main barrier is a lack of understanding as to how to accommodate e-learning to SMEs – and indeed to enterprise in general. People have too optimistic a view of e-learning as a whole – it is sold as if going to solve all problems and then when it does not work it is never tried again. E-learning is seen as a replacement for more traditional learning media – even in cases where no training is going on at all.

How can these barriers be overcome?

SMEs need tailor made solutions but lack know-how in training. Training is seen as a formal thing. SMEs are not exploiting opportunities for learning as a whole and e-learning is at the bottom of the list of issues because it is seen as a bit more complex. SMEs need a fundamental understanding of learning and how e-learning fits into learning programmes.

In a good SME – in whatever organisational sector – if it is performing well and workers have enough autonomy – people will be learning. This requires:

Good communication
Good organisation
Good common collective problem solving
Good relations between customers and producers
Good relations between managers and workers.

If an SME has these then you have learning – any kind of learning. It requires an environment which will stimulate people to think. E-learning has to fit into that – to assist communication, problems solving, making available new information on customers, products, technology, solutions and support all those things. The problem is that organisations that do not have these things think elearning is a waste of time – people will be cynical if they are not in an environment which supports learning.

SMEs do not see the necessity for training except where it arises out of a felt need. Until they have awareness of a need to learn something new you do not have conditions for learning. We cannot force people to learn – it will at best only be partially effective. Learning must be a democratic dialogue between people.

What policies can help this process?

In policy terms let a thousand flowers bloom – as economically as possible and without incurring extra expense. The issue is not one of just investment on training but of creating conditions for people with different experiences and qualification levels to share practical knowledge and experiences with each other. Policy should promote more trust in people – in developing their confidence in their own resources to learn and solve problems for themselves. We need to see people as resourceful. We should start from a proficiency not deficiency model of development. This can only be manifested in relations between management and workers. Policy has to look at work life and how people organise work and the quality of working life. Management and workers should be reviewing progress in a collaborative way. We need actions programmes to make people aware of these things – to link quality, productivity, the knowledge society and learning.

Programmes and development should build on tacit, localised and situated knowledge to develop what is called a ‘work conducive learning environments’. This is not to be confused as a softly-softly approach – it has to be in the ambit of honest talking, reviewing and evaluating the effectiveness of an SME.

Work life one of most controlled areas of society – very different from family life even though in the family people are making huge decisions without supervision and are also making critical and difficult economic decisions. The whole attitude to work is a controlling top down approach and e-learning is still seen as a top down approach – particularly with assessment packages and feedback packages etc. This is OK for those who are well educated and can manage exams.

What policies are being promoted at the moment?

There is lots of talk from European agencies but they do not know how learning takes place within how SMEs. The European Commission Directorate Generals focusing on learning in SMEs are too much focussed on formal learning. They do not really value learning that takes place outside a classroom context or a the very controlled context of a formal learning programme – it is not within their culture and language even when they try to introduce ‘innovations’ like problem based learning. They are still predominantly concerned with capturing outcomes and packaging learning in the controlled environment that they are at home with. That has become more prominent now that vocational training is under the control of education ministries in the Member States comprised of middle ranking civil servants most of whom have never even organised a formal learning experience not to mind having an understanding of informal learning experiences.

The need for a coherent concept of lifelong learning or life-wide learning calls for the linking of all sorts of different factors together – health, the lack of stress, the impact of technology and technological change, competitiveness, change management, HRD policies, work-life balance - all these kinds of things are the ingredients of a learning society. If we are only dealing with educational institutions we will always be trying to redefine and control or colonise (although maybe that is too hard a word) the things that have escaped from control and bring them back in. It is the opposite to distilling – it is like boiling out the goodness of the food – the vitamins from the vegetables.

Who do you think should be responsible for helping SMEs introduce e-learning?

Support can come from regional networks, from other SMEs, through a dialogue with researchers, from technical advisers or business advisers. The objective of government intervention should to set the ball rolling and to promote dialogue. The concept of a learning society or learning organisation is a non-starter without dialogue at every level. Policy role is to stimulate and support local networking.

We need to get people talking openly and confront each other. There are examples of this going on. There is an interesting case in Sweden. The lowest level of university participation is in a region called Gnosjo – but it has the highest productivity and the lowest unemployment built on a strategy of competitive-cooperation. (For more on this see Gustavsen and Ennals publications on Development Coalitions).

Who do you think should be responsible for financing e-learning. Should there be public subsidies and if so, who should it be paid to?

Public financing requires long-term thinking going form national and regional perspectives but the quality of programmes or initiatives is more important than the funding. Bad funding can do more harm than good – should be seen to complement and stimulate development. It should only cover a small percentage of overall investment – say 20 per cent – and companies should allocate resources and time in lieu of money.

Do you think there should be legislation to improve access to continuing / further training for SME employees. If so what sort of legislation?

Legislation should focus on laying down minimal conditions – it should tie in with other rules on working conditions enforced by law. Training is built into that by its very nature – people should have induction into health and safety and should be trained to work with dangerous machinery. It has to be a minimal level. For training itself – when you go beyond those levels - there are different practices in different countries in Europe – on the whole I think programmes are better than laws – say an innovation programme in every region as distinct form forcing companies to do a set number of hours of training.

There are different agendas to fulfil with regard to learning in SMEs – one is for the productive life of company as a whole and this has to be done internally – including for example a good platform / arena for exchanging information and feedback between employees.

On the other hand if individuals want to improve their own qualifications then of course people should have the right and support to do so. This could be through going to a course in community or participating in an e-learning or distance learning course – that is one way of addressing that need. But there is a limit to what an SME can do in these cases, so learning for the effective production of the company as a whole, with the fallout of benefits for individuals, must be seen as the main activity

If you could implement one policy to assist SMEs with technology what would it be?

The sharing of experiences and knowledge at a regional level– creating networks relating to experiences of sharing - what did they did right and what they did wrong, sharing feedback and learning – what works – how do make things work. It is what I call natural learning. This has got to be inspired by a community of mutual sharing. A meeting I was in Denmark it was pointed out that local economic development projects and networks with vested interests in their own community work best. Sharing and learning cannot be forced – that is why I worry about the legislative approach.

Never quite understood what people mean by instructional design. As used in this context it seems to me to be a strategies for learning and teaching or pedagogies. But this is a great collection of different theories, well indexed and linked.

Last month Ray and myself were invited by the European Commission to a seminar in Brussels on "Creating, Sharing and Reusing e-Learning Content: Access Rights for e-learning Content". There were two one day events one on copyright and the other on creating reusable content. I will write another entry on my overall impressions of the event.
Attached here is our joint position statement.

content_position_paper_v2.doc

In October (not November as I said in an earlier entry) the European Commission e-Learning Programme held a two day workshop in Brussels on e-Learning Content. The first day was focused around licensing and copyright issues with the second day more focused on content creation and reuse. Obviously there was quite some overlap and some participants were invited to both days.

I attended the first day on behalf of the SIG Open Source Software in Education in Europe project and Ray Elpherink from Raycom attended the second day on behalf of the project.

There were some twenty participants in both days, invited form a wide range of those interested in such a subject including major software companies, publishers, education providers and media organisations.
To their credit, the Commission organised the event very well, inviting everyone to provide a two page position paper before the event (see previous entry for copy of our paper) and running the event as a workshop.

I will ask Ray to write a short account of the second day. Opinions were widely divided on the first day. Roughly speaking the workshop was polarised between those advocating Open Content and the publishers who wanted to tighten rules and practice on digital rights.

Following the event Brian Holmes who organised the consultation workshop on behalf of the European Commission circulated a summary. Of course no-one was satisfied and this led to a lengthy and lively email discussion.

The position papers and summary have now been published on DG Education and Culture's web site. They will be publicizing the site in the New Year and are intending to launch a discussion on the outcomes. It is intended that the results of the discussions will inform future policy by the Commission in this area.

Bridges for Recognition of Youth Work (Belgium January 19-25 2005) is a European Event which brings together youth workers, trainers, non-formal and formal learning organisers, social partners from the labour market and policy makers, to take further steps towards the recognition of non-formal learning.

Tony Geudens who is one of the event organisers has posted the following message:

As many as there are stakeholders in the recognition debate, as many there are opinions on how to go about recognition. Manuel Souto (from EcoTec, a consultancy doing an "inventory of validation of non-formal and informal learning" for the European Commission and participant at Bridges) bumped into the following 'Hot Issues' nobody seemed to agree on.

We are looking for your opinion and suggestions on how to move these issues forward! (these can be used at the Bridges conference!) The issues are related to the following 3 strands

▪ Preconditions for validation of non-formal and informal learning in the Youth sector
▪ Implementation of the validation and recognition
▪ Monitoring and transferability

Strand one: Preconditions

1 Predisposition of Youth Organisations to take part in the validation of non-formal and informal learning?

Do youth organisations want validation and recognition? How can they be stimulated? Is/Should youth work be about 'education'? How can we make most of it? Is there a way to save the pudding and eat it at the same time?

2 Division of responsibilities: Who is to do what in validation?

Who takes responsibility for validation and recognition? Is it governments, European Institutions, young people themselves, youth organisations, specialised training organisations, or schools? Or how to cooperate between them?

3 Resources: funding validation

Working on validation and recongition takes someone's time and time is money, so who's supposed to pay? Where could/should the money come from?

Strand two: Implementation

1 Formalising the informal: a risk or something to gain from?

Does the validation of learning as done in the youth sector change it's character? Will youth work become more formal or will it carry on as usual? What is the impact? What could be the benefits? How can bridges between the different sectors (formal-nonformal) be created?

2 Standards setting: a framework for quality and legitimacy

Who is entitled to set the standards, and who should then judge the standards. And if there are standards, what happens to those that don't reach the standards? Are standards in soft skills uberhaupt possible?

3 Validation methodologies and quality assurance: making standards a reality in practice

What instruments and validation methodologies can Youth organisations use to assess that a person really did acquire new skills within the context of its activities (and not somewhere else)? Or how to avoid people falsely ascribing skills to the membership/work in a Youth organisation?

4 Validation of non-formal learning and equality

Is validation of non-formal learning creating chances and opportunities for those who dropped out/dislike the formal education OR will young people with fewer opportunities (school drop outs) be at a double disadvantage when e.g. employers now not only will ask for school grades but also for youth work participation? How to ensure that all young people can benefit equally from validation of non-formal and informal learning?

Strand three: transferability

1 Transferability between sectors: flexibility, recognition and employability

How can my youth work skills be transferred to other sectors? do they fit for a job, in a different contect? How can the bridge be made?

2 Transferability between countries: Validation in a mobile Europe

How can my youth work experience in one country be validated/accepted (in a youth organisation) in another country. Should we create terminologies and standards? Who and how? What other initiatives could facilitate recognition of skills acquired in a non-formal setting in a country different to that where they were acquired?

3 Transferability between organisations: Making the most of good practice

There are many examples of good practice (as presented at Bridges for Recognition) in validation of non-formal learning but how to get to know and use them? How to share strengths and weaknesses. How can these difficulties be overcome?

So feel free to tell us wrong or tell us right. Throw some oil on the fire, or some water. Your contributions will be used in the workshops at Bridges for Recognition (www.SALTO-YOUTH.net/BridgesForRecognition/).