The Wales-Wide Web

Hi - thanks to all of you who have asked where I am - been traveling for last ten days - hence lack of blog entries - now have to get my thoughts together and report on some of the meetings I have been at. In the meantime, thought this Education Guardian article is interesting. Is it that the UK mass degree policy is devaluing degrees? Or could it just be that learning is becoming more valuable than formal academic qualifications?

"The financial value of a university degree has fallen sharply in the past decade as more graduates enter the job market, research shows.

The study by academics at the University of Swansea shows that graduates can now expect to earn £150,000 more over the course of their careers than those who do not go to university, rather than the £400,000 ministers claimed during the debate last year on university top-up fees, which will be introduced in September 2006. The National Union of Students said it was not surprised by the findings."

Portfolios are attracting a lot of attention these days see for instance Scott Wilson's brilliant presentation. I have been in three project meetings discussing their potential. Most of my work is connected with non formal learning, work based learning and vocational education and training. Portfolios have an obvious attraction in these areas in allowing learners to record and reflect on learning from different contexts.

Picked up this quote from the GURTEEN Knowledge web site.

Since there is no single set of abilities running throughout human nature, there is no single curriculum which all should undergo. Rather, the schools should teach everything that anyone is interested in learning."

If there is no single curriculum which all should undergo then there can be no single way of representing and recording learning that all should undergo. Rather, the portfolio should include everything that anyone is interested in including.

Time for a currency exchange from Guardian Unlimited: Newsblog:

Much sense from the Guardian economics editor. I'm not so sure his solution of scrapping the Euro is very practical. But it shows what is wrong. And getting rid of neoliberal economic policies would be a first step, as well as some kind of democratic control over the European Central bank.

I've been in six European countries in the last 10 days. Of course everyone is very happy hot to have to carry endless wedges of different currencies - although interestingly two of the countries I've been in - Estonia and Romania do not have the Euro. But - perhaps more than anyone else - those countries are suffering from the mindless neo-liberal policies - which if course are backed most enthusiastically by the Euro sceptic government of the UK. And people are not prepared to accept the crassness of the politicians telling us that if we vote against the Constitution we are voting against peace in Europe.

Just in case any ed-tech readers wonder what this rant has to do with them - part of the neo liberal policy is to attack open source software and impose draconian copyright legislation.

"At the time the euro was launched, opposition on the left came from three distinct groups. The Keynesians said a one-size-fits-all economy would be bad for jobs and growth. The greens said vesting power in an unelected remote central bank would cause a crisis of political legitimacy. The Marxists said that the single currency was a Trojan horse for neoliberal economic policies. All three predictions have proved to be 100% accurate."

Oh dear - the overwork is getting in the way of writing on the blog - sad - its much more fun.

Everyone suddenly wants to talk portfolios. Last week I was even asked by a group of students in Germany if I would do a seminar for them on the subject. today I have been asked if I can talk to a group of Italian exchange students on portfolios.

Now why so much interest? It's partly driven by student interest I think. A new generation of net savvy students are growing up and they want to use the web. Portfolio's are natural to them.

It's partly because of an increased interest on personal learning - as the use of the internet and the growing importance of work based learning break down the monopoly of educational institutions on learning.

My big frustration is that portfolios are still being seen as something for learners within the formal system. In Europe at least, it is partly due to pressures at a political level for increased mobility and transparency of qualifications. Interestingly, portfolios are also being seen in a European context as a way of expressing previous learning - particularly for socially disadvantaged young people or for those with low previous qualifications.

And of course it's partly due to the ongoing pressure for lifelong learning. Portfolios are seen as a way of recording on-going learning achievement.

That are many reasons to be hopeful that portfolios will work.

There are also a lot of reasons why they may not. My big frustration is that portfolios are still being seen as something for learners within the formal system. As always happens with any innovation, e- portfolio development has taken place in the context of existing paradigms of education and training. This means development has been dominated by universities and worse dominated by the assessment goals of higher education institutions. Put quite simply portfolios have been seen as yet another form of recording and assessing student achievement. What's wrong with this approach?

Firstly the assessment process is owned by the system and by the institutions. This means learners do not own their portfolio. Secondly institutional provision of portfolios has tended to militate against portability. When learners leave an institution the portfolio stays with that organisations - they do not own it - neither can they take it with them.

More problematically the range of achievement and learning reflected in the portfolio is constrained by curricula and course objectives. The only valid portfolio entries are those that support attainment of externally imposed objectives. Learners do not own their learning.

I think we need to look at the different activities in developing a portfolio.

I see them as follows:

• Identifying learning and achievement
• Reflecting on learning and achievement
• Recording learning and achievement
• Validating learning and achievement
• Presenting learning and achievement

Assessing plays no part in this. Assessment may take place against a presentation but it is not part of the portfolio process. The greater the restraint placed against learner recording and reflection - eg. reflect on how far you have achieved these competence - the less use the portfolio is in terms of learning.

...many existing portfolio applications place intolerable restraints on what is seen as valid learning Validating is not the same thing as assessing. Validation is the process of displaying evidence to back up reflected learning. Of course such evidence may help in the assessment process but that is something different.

There are great ideas and e-portfolio applciations being produced - mostly based on bloggs and social software. (see for instance the very impressive ELGG). there is also some pretty dire stuff (I won't name it - its not hard to find). What's wrong with many existing applciations? I've already talked about the ownership issue. More than that many existing portfolio applications place intolerable restraints on what is seen as valid learning. Most existing applciations conflate the different processes I described above or focus on only one or tow of those processes - usually recording, presenting and assessing. There has been little coniseration of how to support reflection. This is critical if portfolios are to move form beyond the priveledged university sector to become worthwhile for all learners.

Ok - I've run out of time. But more tomorrow...

OK - working on a few projects at once at the moment. Will try to post stuff as I write it.

One of the things I am working on is mentoring. This is for a European project led by the Athens Chamber of Commerce. The project aims to train some sixty mentors to support participants on work experience and to help socially disadvantaged people gain employment. In the first phase of the work we are looking at different experiences and practices in mentoring to develop a firmer concept and work programme for the project and to inform the development of a training programme for the mentors. My role is to provide notes of experiences, research and practices in mentoring.

What particularly interests me in this is that - as I have written before - learning is taking place in ever wider contexts. This in turn is leading to new roles for teachers and trainers. Many of the competencies required of a workplace mentor will be - I suspect - very similar to the role of teachers and trainers in e-learning.

This first note looks at definitions of mentoring and examines how mentoring can support learning within the workplace.

There have been many rules and rubrics published regarding the development of e-learning environments. I stumbled on this one the other day in a book I helped edit (can't find the book on line - must put it there but related papers can be found here) . Interestingly it was developed for work based learning - and pre-dates the advent of e-learning. Nevertheless I think it stands up pretty well in the e-learning age.

A powerful teaching and learning environment occurs where :

• it is based on the provision of direct experience rather than indirect experience and use of representational systems

• it is based on learning through action in the contexts in which the learning is to be applied
• learning takes place in the presence of experts practising in the contexts in which the learning is to be applied

• experiences challenge the learner

• individuals become conscious of their implicit theories about learning

• individuals view learning as under their control and as intrinsically rewarding

• learners become conscious of their thinking and learning strategies
• there are the conditions of collaborative teamwork which provide experience for the learner in the form of modelling, feedback and encouragement to reflect

• facilitators of learning such as mentor or coach themselves engage in learning to learn, facing problems, adapting to these in the practical context and reflecting on problem formulation and problem solving strategies

• learners gain conscious cognition of unconscious learning through strategies such as meditation, spontaneity, reflection, intuition, imagination and fantasy (Murphy, 1975).
  
  The list is adapted from De Corte (1990)

Its a hot day and I've skived off work for half an hour to have a play. Downloaded a new "next generation" newsreader called Shrook.

Up to now I've been using sage as a newsreader - never really got to grips with Netnewsreader and safari seems not to pick up a lot of feeds.

I love Shrook - but more importantly this is the first programme I have seen which seems to me to be a real e-learning application. It:

• allows me to select where I want to learn from
• to bring togther different sources of knowledge and ideas
• to create my own summaries in the form of a crapbook
• to bring togther different media - downloaded documents, web pages, blogs and audio (podcast) files - which is neatly downloads into i-tunes and will sync with an i-pod
• to track and manage my learning

In short - a personal learning environment!

I'm helping organise this conference and would be very grateful for any help in publicising the event!

Conference on Open Source for education in Europe – Research and practice

Conference web site is http://www.openconference.net/index.php?cf=3

The conference is jointly sponsored by SIGOSSEE, JOIN and the Open University of the Netherlands.

The conference will be held at the Open University of the Netherlands Educational Technology Expertise Centre, Heerlen, The Netherlands on November 14 - 15, 2005

I am designing an e-learning programme for the european Commission funded ASSIPA project. The project aims to develop a face-to-face and e-learning programme for teachers in adult education to develop their skills and practices in self-evaluation . A face-to-face programme has been produced and will be piloted in June 2005. The programme is heavily process oriented, encouraging participants to reflect on and evaluate their own learning experiences. The programme is based around a series of different activities, providing a scaffold for learning. Short input sessions provide the theoretical background to the different activities. As such the programme is highly structured but is also student centred in that it is the learners own experiences which provide the raw material for learning.

Converting the programme to e-learning provides a series of challenges. I think I would argue that these challenges lie at the heart of good e-learning design - whatever the subject.

Part one of this port reviews the challenges will outline my approach to the pedagogy and design.

Technorati Tags: e-learning design, pedagogy

On a long, hot and somewhat confused journey trying to get to Milan. So time to catch up on some long overdue blog posts - whilst the battery holds out. Sorry no links but will come back later and add - no time / opportunity at present

A couple of weeks ago I was at a meeting of the Special Interest Group on Open Source Software in europe. One of the recurrent discussion was on the nature of different Open Source projects. Over the last year we have seen the proliferation of Open Source platforms for learning. More recently, there has been some commentary as to whether or not these platforms scale for large institutional delivery. Three platforms in particular seem to have emerged to the fore, Moodle, .LRN and Sakai. In general the Open Source development community is very supportive of Moodle. The Moodle community is seen as open and inclusive with lively forums and much information available on implementing and using the platform. The opposite is seen of Sakai. No-one is quite sure what it is and where it is going, information on ten open areas of the Sakai site is sparse and the community would seem to be closed.

The end result is a great deal of skepticism - sometimes bordering ion hostility - towards the Sakai development - with a perception that it is a well funded corporate development by and for the larger universities. All this may or may not be true. My own perception is that Sakai is aiming at creating greater interoperability through its architecture than the more traditional OSS VLEs. But certainly I couldn't say for sure. I would be grateful if anyone could point me to a clear account of what Sakai is trying to achieve and in particular if Sakai is aiming to be used by smaller organisations. Scaling works both ways.

We also need to think a little more about the pros and cons of different governance models for OSS. I see some merits in a 'trust' or 'association' based model as opposed to the gut feeling open source community model. But if development projects adapt such a model they need to make their developmental roadmaps clear, for the wider communities in educational technology and Open Source to be able to understand the direction in which they are working. Or it may be we need better differentiation in describing projects. Maybe Open Source is becoming too broad a term.

Technorati Tags: e-learning platforms, open source models

Rapid eLearning News: Findings from NSF Study:

Interesting post in The Rapid e-Learning News blog. The entry (sorry have no connection and do not know the name of the author) quotes a report by the US National Science Foundation looking at informal learning in the workplace. Job competence of sales engineers demonstrated a statistically significant positive correlation with customer satisfaction. Formal learning methods demonstrated a statistically significant negative correlation with job competence. Informal learning methods demonstrated a statistically positive correlation with job competence. In this case, informal learning methods included a well organized ‘communities of practice’ program supported by extensive, expert knowledge capture and retrieval processes and technologies.

The author suggests the reason for these results is that competent workers who learn from their own experiences require less formal training whilst “Less competent workers do not have the cognitive framework needed to effectively assimilate new knowledge independently, and therefore, utilize informal methods relatively less”. the author believes informal and formal learning are “two approaches to learning that are both more and less appropriate under different circumstances.”

.

Technorati Tags: non formal learning, work based learning

In Milan for a conference entitled Open Culture: accessing and sharing Knowledge - scholarly production and education in the digital age.

In truth the heat (it's 38 degrees), stress from things I have to do this week and a pretty horrendous journey yesterday are not improving my concentration.

But I greatly enjoyed a presentation entitled Community Plumbing in Action: BEAT and the Campus Commons by Mark Hemphill from the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. Its well worth a look at his full paper.

NB - Will try posting my presentation on Flickr later today. Look in the list of linksat the top of this entry for links to versions of my talk.

Technorati Tags: blogging, social software

There's much going for portfolios but there are some pretty thorny issues still to be solved. At the heart of these is the purpose and ownership of portfolios. Put simply are they an institutional application for assessment or s student owned utility (or set of tools) for recording and reflecting on learning.

Tomorrow I'm off to Bucharest for a meeting of the ICOVET project. In focusing on the validation on non formal learning this argument is central to the ICOVET partners.

I've been doing a little research on e-portfolios and have been trying to redefine both processes involved in developing an e-portfolio and the meaning of the terminology we employ. This definition of validation owes much to Scott Wilson's presentation on e-portfolios. I'd be interested in feedback

Technorati Tags: non formal learning, e-portfolios