The Wales-Wide Web

I'm in Bucharest for a workshop organised by the EU funded ICOVET project. the project is looking at the validation of non formal learning for socially disadvantaged young people. It is extremely interesting - and important - in that it raises in a concrete way many of the issues involved in the on-going debate over the design and implementation of e-portfolios.

I have just participated in a working group looking at “the main issues, questions, critical points' related to the validation of non-formal and informal learning.”

Technorati Tags: e-portfolios, non formal learning, pedagogy

Last week I was at the European Commission funded ICOVET project meeting in Bucharest. The project aims to develop and implement tools for the recognition and validation of non formal learning for socially disadvantaged young people. The project partners include researchers and practitioners from Germany, Greece, the UK, Romania, Ireland and Spain.

Initially I got involved with the project because I have long been interested in the potential of informal and non formal learning - as a means of knowledge development and as an alternative to what I see as the present 'industrial' model of education and training.

More recently my interest has moved on to how we might use Portfolios - and social software - as a tool for recording and validating learning.
In my presentation at the meeting - which I hope will shortly be available on my Flickr pages (and thanks to Magda from ISE in Romania as a transcription), I presented the different processes which I think are involved in developing a portfolio.

These are:

• recording
• reflecting
• validating
• planning
• presenting
• assessing

For recognising non formal learning the most important activities are recording, reflecting, validating and presenting.

Technorati Tags: e-portfolios, non formal learning, social software

Mike has made a very sweet TagCloud for my blog. only problem is I have no idea what use it is!

[FSFE PR][EN] Free Software Foundation Europe: No software patents in Europe, requests EPO review instrument:

Excellent news from the Free Software Foundation Europe. Whilst the size of teh vote may be in part due to MEPs' frustration with the european Commision in trying to railroad through a proposal which obviously lacked support - it also represents the strength of the campaign against patents and a growing understanding of the importance of shared and open knowledge.

"After years of struggle, the European Parliament finally rejected the software patent directive with 648 of 680 votes: A strong signal against patents on software logic, a sign of lost faith in the European Union and a clear request for the European Patent Office (EPO) to change its policy: the EPO must stop issuing software patents today."

Technorati Tags: open source software

From the Guradian web site on "London's day of terror from Guardian Unlimited"

"One thing that became clear was the unprecedented role, at least for the coverage of a disastrous event within Britain, of camera phones, The most immediate images (particularly true of video images) were taken by eyewitnesses and participants in the events, by citizens rather than professionals."

Particularly notable was the speed at which a gallery of pictures appeared on Flickr - social software is hitting the mainstream and citizen journalism becoming a living reality.

Technorati Tags: social software

A couple of weeks ago I blogged on 'The Seven Challenges of e-Learning Design (Part 1)'. It received some kind words from some in the ed-tech blogging community. My colleague Mike Malloch was less convinced. He pointed to the poor writing and the lack of well thought through ideas. (He also pointed out there were eight challenges, not seven!)

I plead guilty. But I have a defence. I increasingly see my blog as part of my everyday work. Many of the things I write are the sort of things that never before made it beyond the back of an envelope hurriedly scrawled down in a conversation with a colleague or written in the pub. Should these things be shared? I think so. At the end of the day this blog is mine - and if anyone else chooses to read it that is up to them. I am always gratified when someone reads my notes and even more so when they reply. More so, I think that knowledge development may really take place through an exchange and discourse around half thought out ideas - sometimes born of need (to produce a plan for a project), obsession (or too much beer) rather than in well formulated dissertations.

So you have been warned. Here is Part 2 of the Seven Challenges of e-Learning Design. It is written out of conviction, but also because I have a deadline to produce a plan for the ASSIPA project meeting. Would love to have any feedback - negative or positive.

Technorati Tags: e-learning design, e-portfolios, non formal learning, pedagogy, social software

Nigel Robertson says ::

"It would be interesting to get a range of international views on the uptake of eportfolios - is it happening? for what reasons? what is driving it? From the UK it seems (to me) that the US is the only place with widespread use".

He may well be right. But the interest in ePortfolios is from far wider places. I have been talking with project groups all over Europe about e-Portfolios in the last three months.

Interestingly - none from universities. I'm never happy with the term 'lifelong learning. Seems to me it has been devalued by overuse and misuse. But the real potential for e-Portfolios is in the widening contexts in which learning is taking place - or is recognised to be taking place - and in the ability to bring together personal learning gained in multiple contexts. If we take this as a starting point we can start looking at specific applications.

Here are three that I am working on.

Firstly for apprentices in Slovenia and Italy. Portfolios can help bring together formal learning from the school based component of the apprenticeship with learning from the workplace.

Secondly with socially disadvantaged young people in five different European countries. Portfolios can be used to help them recognise and record their learning and reflect and validate their learning experiences.

Thirdly, for adult education teachers following an on line professional development programme in self assessment.

For all the objective is different - but for all portfolios could be a valuable tool to record and reflect on their learning.

And not a university in sight!

Technorati Tags: e-portfolios, non formal learning, pedagogy, work based learning

Yes its true. I know I have been quiet lately but have been tied up in meetings. Last week I was in Bristol for a meeting of the JISC eLearning programme, for which I am evaluator. And Wednesday to Saturday was a meeting of the ASSIPA project on self evaluation for teachers.

I have a contract to help develop the e-learning version of the self evaluation course. As I wrote earlier, here and here, we are planning to create a blog, written by a 'virtual' or fictitious learner, Sarah Jones, around which to construct a learning narrative and as a link to learning materials and activities. As (real) learners work through the blog they can reply to sarah Jones entries and build up their own learning record or diary through the ir own blog. Their blogs will, in turn, become source material for future learners.

Our Italian parters, led by Elaria Mascitti from FORCOM, videod the entire workshop, which was based on a series of experiential learning activities. I hope to be able to produce a number of shortish videos of the different activities as part of the e-learning materials.

I was a little worried before the meeting that the idea would be too radical for the partners but everyone was into it. I increasingly feel that most elearning developers - or at least researchers know that present elearning pedagogies do not work and are looking for alternatives. What seems to be holding people back is the unwillingness of institutions to experiment.

OK, thats all for now. I have a notebook full of ideas for future posts - will try to put aside 20 minutes a day to write some of them up.

BBC NEWS | Technology | 'Free' Danish beer makes a splash:

Shortened version of article on the BBC web site. I love it. The students have made something useful and have published it. Great pedagogy, great learning, great outcomes!

"Students from the Information Technology University in Copenhagen" have released "what they are calling the world's first open source beer recipe.

Rasmus Nielsen, who runs a Copenhagen-based artist collective called Superflex, wanted to challenge the idea of 'proprietary' beer.

Mr Nielsen asked his students to think about applying open source ideas to the non-digital world.

"Why not take those ideas back to the old world, and try to apply them to other things as well?" asks Nielsen.

Why beer? As the Vores Oel website says, why not?

"It's a universal commodity that we like to think of as free, but unfortunately it isn't," says Mr Nielsen. "So, I thought it was an appropriate medium to confront these issues."

The students also created a label for the beer, and a website that comes complete with catchy, open source music and sound effects.

Most important, the students released the recipe under what is called a Creative Commons licence.

"You're free to change it," says Mr Nielsen. "But if you use our recipe as the basis for your beer, you have to be open with your recipe as well. That's the legal framework that follows the beer."

You can even sell your own version, as long as you credit Our Beer for the recipe.

The tipple has proved a hit. The Our Beer website has been a busy place, says Mr Nielsen.

"We got loads of questions from small beer brewers in Mexico, Brazil, and even Afghanistan," he says. "Afghanistan, that was weird."

One smaller Danish brewer is even planning on brewing up some of Our Beer to sell in the autumn.

Both Mr Nielsen and his students hope that what people take away from the Our Beer project is that open source is not just for the digital world.

Mr Nielsen says there is no reason that developing countries could not use the idea to manufacture, for example, their own HIV/AIDS drugs."

Not had enough time for reading lately - and this is a big addition to the pile of stuff building up. Stephen pointed to this in his newsletter. The papers are from the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Organizational Learning and Knowledge organised on the theme of 'The Passion for Learning and Knowing' and edited by Silvia Gherardi and Davide Nicolini.

The two (large) PDF files contain many interesting papers papers. Hot on my reading list is 'Writing learning stories' by Claudia Jonczy which, according to Stephen develops a case writing approach consisting of three phases: the descriptive, the reflective and the critical. The intent is, through analysis of the metaphors used in storytelling, to extract and make explicit tacit knowledge embedded in the descriptions.

In a massive edited volume like this you need a good title and Olav Eikeland's 'Pragmatic turn, erotic epistemology, and new production of knowledge. Dialogical encounters between several discourses on knowledge and learning in organisations' certainly gets my vote.

One quick query - can anyone tell me why I cannot save this downloaded file - I am using an Apple Powerbook.