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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Technorati Tags: big brother, e-learning, e-portfolios, education and training research, eportfolio, pedagogy, social software

Need to install Ganttproject on my Mac - OS X. But when I try to start it get the following error message - The jar file "eclipsito.jar" couldn't be launched. Has anyone any ideas on why and what I should do?

Technorati Tags: Open source, social software

I got a beta account with Writely some time ago but forgot to give it a try. Stung into action by Microsoft announcing their move to web based software, I thought I would give it a go. Its fabulous - great potential for changing work flow in terms of sharing documents.

And...I saw this blog tab. Like usual I hit the tab without thinking of trying the help - or even what it might do. Entered the url and all the rest. And it worked - first time - wonderful.

Technorati Tags: social software

EducationGuardian.co.uk | News crumb | Teaching of 3 Rs in 'crisis', says CBI:

I have got bored with this sort of article and have stopped commenting there is a real issue which needs addressing.

"The number of pupils leaving school without mastering the three Rs has reached "crisis" proportions, the CBI warned today.

Sir Digby Jones, CBI director-general, called for schools to be better funded so children could be taught in smaller classes.

In an interview with Teachers' TV News, Sir Digby said: "We've got something like a fifth of the adult population in this country who can't read, write or count.

"We've got half the kids who do a GCSE in the summer not getting grade C or above in English and maths.

"This is a crisis. We're the fourth biggest economy on Earth, we're one of the greatest trading nations on the planet and we haven't even got half the school leavers equipped to deal with the world."

Interesting that 'Sir' Digby from the CBI (which for non UIK based readers stands for the Confederation of British Industry is more concerned about the UKs trading position and economy than he is about the young people.

The government has made the predictable reply that it is spending more, doing more blah, blah blah.

Digby has called for more to be spent, done blah, blah, blah

No-one addresses the real problem which is the profoundly dysfunctional nature of secondary education in western societies. Why secondary? because I think that education sort of works up to the age of about 10 or 12. Kids learn to play, to socialise, to work together, to read, to write and in some countries to handle information and knowledge using computers. All very useful for living in this world.

What do kids learn after that age? That learning is boring. that they have to absorb a whole curriculum of largely randomly selected information and 'facts'. That learning has little relation to the real world outside the school. That learning is a core to be pursued in the name of testing and qualifications - you have to put up with it to get on etc.

So kids rebel. But in the Uk at any ate we stop all that nonsense by putting fences round the schools and by employing kidcatchers (sorry educational welfare officers) to round them up and get them back to school. And if they still rebel we prosecute their parents for failing to ensure their kids attend school.

And we know the system does not work so we embark on endless reforms, publish tables of 'good' schools, develop new curricula, new exams, alternative programmes and so on and so on.

Tinkering with the system will not work and sadly I suspect throwing money at it will not work either. We need a fundamental rethink of the purpose of education and its roles and relation to the wider society. personally I think school has no future. That does not mean I am opposed to education and learning - far from it - but I think schooling does a pretty dammed job.

Technorati Tags: education policy

BBC NEWS | Technology | US youths use internet to create:

In most of my presentations on Open Source, I have been focusing on changes in the way young people learn. Young people are learning, I have said through trying things out, through making, doing, creating. Now there is an american survey out which backs up my views. makes interesting reading. My big conclusion is that we still need to change our idea of what is content. Content is not something we give to them or do to them, but content is something they make.

"A large swathe of young Americans use the web to create and share content as well as use other people's content for their own creations, says a report.

The Pew American and Internet Life Project research suggested that 12 to 17-year-olds look to web tools to share what they think and do online.

It also said they were much more likely than adults to read and have a weblog.

The report found that those who did have blogs were far more likely to remix and share music and images.

A third said they shared their own work - artwork, photos, stories, or video - with others online. Girls were more likely to do so than boys - 38% compared with 29%.

These teens would say that the companies should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship.

Interestingly, the teenagers who blogged (52%) were more likely to care about copyright issues than those who did not blog.

"These teens were born into a digital world where expect to be able to create, consume, remix, and share material with each other and lots of strangers," Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, told the BBC News website."

Technorati Tags: education and training research, Open content, pedagogy

e-Portfolios: New Features Planned for Elgg:

From the e-portfolios blog.

"Elgg users will be able to create presentations by extracting content based on keywords (similar to Gmail where you can create things called labels - you use these to house certain emails)

- the user will create a presentation called whatever they want - they will then be able to go and extract any content they want have have it display in this presentation

- the presentation will have its own URL which they can then point people to

- this enables users to create presentations for specific audience"

Forwarding it here to make sure reaches some of the readers of this blog. Also think it is vital in showing differences between reflective portfolio development and assessment. I won't bore readers again with my usual diatribe against the hijacking of portfolios for assessment. Presentation is how users interact with assessment by choosing a selection of their work which they wish to be assessed.

ELGg goes form strength to strength.

Technorati Tags: e-learning, e-portfolios

Meant to Post this last week - behind with everything at the moment - but better late than never I suppose.

As you all must know by now I presented a paper at the European e-Portfolio conference last week. A couple of people have been kind enough to email me asking if I could put a copy of my presentation on the blog.

The paper can be found here and the presentation is at the bottom of this post. Did not actually intend saying anything else but now I'm started will go on a bit.

The conference was very well attended - I guess over 200 people from many different countries. sadly I could only stay for the first day - time is in short supply at the moment.

The "welcome address" was delivered by Greg Watson, the (new or so I'm told) chief executive of OCR - one of the largest of the UK examinations and accreditation boards. I wasn't expecting much so was quite delighted when he talked about the danger of assessment dominating portfolios. Good stuff.

Helen Barrett was the keynote speaker. Sort of falls in that strange American category of 'inspirational". Enjoyable it was and she had great examples of multi media story telling. But my fear is that the software and skills required to produce such electronic stories remain way beyond average teacher and trainer skills at present - let alone that of most learners. As such, examples like this can tend to make people more wary of trying - "I can't do anything that good, they think".

Went to two workshop sessions - including my own. The first was Learning and learners - Social Inclusion and Accessibility. Great opening address by Bonnie Dudly Edwards who was moderating. Then two very good presentations. Anna Home form the University of Bristol presented The use of e‑portfolios for social inclusion: what counts as valid evidence?. Nice research design raising issues of what we shoudl be looking for as evidence of achievement. Providing a visual tool for dyslexics to build an ePortfolio by John Phelps of Goldsmiths University of London (UK) presented the JISC funded VMAP portfolio software. Had a preview of this at the JISC conference last year and I liked it then. John claimed that the reason they had stated out down a 'visual path is because Goldsmiths runs arts course and an incredibly high (can't remember how high) percentage of arts students are dyslexic and therefore worked better with a visual rather than text based tool. Interesting. But as far as I can see the approach - very much like mind mapping - offers many ideas for how we can make portfolios more attractive and easier to use. It seems the software is now available on Source Forge. Good to see the JISC e-leanring programme rolling out the products!

The final presentation in this slot was from Martyn Cooper of the Open University and Andy Heath of Sheffield Hallam on ePortfolio: The Accessibility Landscape. Tut, tut, boys - you haven't got your presentation up on the web yet. Not so accessible! But a seriously good and entertaining presentation. This is another of the JISC projects.

I was on in the afternoon session on ePortfolio learning and learners. Darren Cambridge from George Mason University gave a great presentation on the implementation of portfolios in, I think, Minnesota. Shame it is not yet available on the e-Portfolio confernce web site. Certainly took the wind out of my sails by showing there are implementations in the US which are not so assessment oriented. Then me - you can judge my presentation yourselves. And finally Ali Jafari from Indiana University who confirmed all my worst prejudices about the misuse of portfolios when presenting Lessons Learned: Concepts and Architecture for Developing Epsilen Portfolio Project.

And that was it. I could not stay for the next day. But thoroughly enjoyable and revived my faith in the possibilities around e-Portfolios.

PS2B_attwell_barrett.ppt

Technorati Tags: e-learning, e-portfolios, eportfolio, pedagogy

PLE Project Summary:

I have a contract as evaluator of the JISC elearning programme. Its a pretty mind boggling programme, embracing over 100 projects divided into different strands and actions. I find it hard to keep an overview of the project, despite the hard work of the folks running the programme web site.

Occasionally a project does grab my attention. The one which I am excited about at the moment is the Personal Learning Environments project. Its very nice to see they have set up a blog site for the project.

Here's a short description of what they are up to:

" The last five years have seen a major uptake of VLEs by colleges and universities. The vast majority of these are large, institutional systems, which are predominantly course based providing support for content distribution, discussion and assessment, mainly through proprietary tools. There are several problems with this approach of which two are of most concern.

VLEs are not easily customised to suit the needs and preferences of individuals
As learners move between institutions, they may need to learn the interfaces to different VLEs.

An alternative approach would be to locate a large amount of VLE functionality with the learner either as a desktop application or an independently hosted portal. Institutions would still provide content via repositories, undertake assessment and so on, but learners would interact with these using their personal systems (Personal Learning Environment), comprising their preferred tools and ways of working."

I think this is a big deal in that it transfers ownership to the learner. Instead of the learner logging in to a university based system the leaner is able to integrate multiple contexts and sources of learning and develop their own 'learning mix'. Moreover this promises to be of use to the many, many thousands of learners who are not registered with educational institutions. It may even force institutions to reflect on their role in supporting - rather than defining - learning and knowledge.

Technorati Tags: e-learning, e-portfolios, education and training research, eportfolio, non formal learning

Occasionally I go to the Cedefop web site to check out whether they have any calls for tender etc (done a bit of work for them in the past). had to laugh when I saw this one advertised:

Business Contingency and Disaster Recovery consulting services to Cedefop

Does the new director know something we don't.

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Special Reports | Guardian columnist Ted Wragg dies:

This is very sad - he was one of the good guys.

"Ted Wragg, one of the best known figures in English education, has died suddenly at the age of 67.

He retired formally as head of Exeter University's school of education in 2003 after 32 years but an energetic flow of articles and activities - including regular columns in the Guardian - continued to make his genial presence robustly felt in debates about education.

Constantly defending the classroom teacher against bureaucracy and misguided political initiatives, Wragg was hero worshipped in staff rooms, if not in Whitehall or the offices of the schools inspectorate, Ofsted."

The conference on Open Source for Education in Europe, organized by the SIGOSSEE and JOIN projects, in conjunction with the Open University of the Netherlands, got underway Monday morning.

I got to Heerlen yesterday afternoon. Fred de Vries and his team from the Open University had organised everything perfectly, but we felt the need to be here for the non existent last minute preparations for the conference. Went to the pub and has a pleasant afternoon with Ray and alexandra and the rest of the gang.

Last night has a very fine meal in a castle near here. Talked a bit with Stephen Downes who is one of the key note speakers for the conference.

I must admit to being nervous this morning. Despite having some 130 delegates enrolled a horrible number had not paid before the final deadline. In reality my fears were (reasonably groundless) with over 100 turning up by lunchtime. Great work by Marina on the conference organisation desk.

The morning discussion was given over to four key note presentations, myself, Alexandra Toedt, Colin Tatersall and Stephen Downes. I will post more on the content and discussions. If you would like to catch up with the presentations we are trying to get them all posted on the conference website.

A copy of my presentation - entitled 'Learning with Open Source' is attached below.

Technorati Tags: open source

Continuing my journeys around Europe. Back from a great meeting of the ICOVET project in Valencia last week with a stack of ideas which need writing up but not time at the moment. Off to a meeting with JISC in london at the crack of dawn tomorrow (or more like in the middle of the night.
Just a quick point here from a query on a list serve in the mornings mail.
"Currently, I'm working with a high school to develop the Emotional intelligence of the staff and pupils", the post goes. "Has anyone carried out research into developing Emotional Intelligence through ICT or know about an Emotional Intelligence survey suitable for high school pupils?".
I've vaguely noted the increasing posts about emotions (and worse e-motions) in e-learning on the ed- tech blogs in the past few months. But what is emotional intelligence? I fail for the life of me to see how you can produce a questionnaire to measure emotional intelligence. Would welcome anyones views

Technorati Tags: e-learning

I am totally tied up in meetings at the moment. am presently on the 28th floor of Centre Point - a tower block in the centre of London for a meeting of the JISC e-learning programme.

Another day with no time to post. But, just to keep you going here is an audio interview I did last week for e-tecahing.org. The web site is in English but the interview is English.

NB You will have to scroll past Steven Downes to get to me - I can't seem to find unique urls for each interview.

Technorati Tags: open source

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts | Literary classics become txt msgs:

I have to admit I am not a great fan of text messaging - for no other reason than I am so slow. But I love this text based revision aid to Pride and Prejudice.

5Sistrs WntngHsbnds. NwMeninTwn-Bingly&Darcy. Fit&Loadd.BigSis Jane Fals 4B,2ndSisLiz H8s D Coz Hes Proud. Slimy Soljr Wikam Sys DHs Shady Past.Trns Out Hes Actuly ARlyNysGuy &RlyFancysLiz. She Decyds She Lyks Him.Evry1 Gts Maryd.

Technorati Tags: e-learning

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Teen Content Creators and Consumers:

I picked this report up a couple of weeks ago and didn't bother posting it becuase I thought everyone would be onto it. But it seems to have been largely overlooked. This report is of vast importance both for the future of content creation and for developing pedagogies for e-learning.

"American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.

Teens are often much more enthusiastic authors and readers of blogs than their adult counterparts. Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. Teen bloggers are more fervent internet users than non-bloggers and have more experience with almost every online activity in the survey."

This is very much at one with what John Seely Brown has written about - young people learning through trail and error - through making and creating - what he calls bricolage.

And it supports my long held assertion that 'learning objects' or learning content will be created largely by learners - not teachers or content developers - in the future. As learners increasingly create content - through repurposing content produced by any learners - it is possible to envisage an ecology of content creation and sharing.

Technorati Tags: e-learning, education and training research, Open content, young people

I read somewhere today that there will be more photographs taken this year than n the entire history of photography. If my own efforts are anything to go by one has to wonder how many of these will be of any use. But I like this photo, taken from the 28th floor of Centre Point in London at a meeting i was in on Tuesday. To the right you can see St Pauls Cathedral - on the left in the distance is the building popularly known as the Gerkin.

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | Gervais returns to radio with Guardian podcast:

"Ricky Gervais is returning to radio with a new weekly show being podcast by the Guardian Unlimited website."

I love radio and I think this is big news.

Firstly it is great that Ricky Gervais has decided to distribute his new show as a podcast (see below). But it is also fascinating that The Guardian newspaper website is distributing the show. Media crossover, big time.

"I want to do a radio show where I can say what I want, when I want for as long as I want and that's free for anybody who can be bothered to listen anywhere in the world," said Gervais.

"We didn't want it to just be the best bits of a radio programme you'd missed so this is a show that is straight-to-Pod-cast. I suppose we're trying to create an exclusive club. We'd prefer this to be a few people's favourite show than a huge samey ineffectual broadcast."