The Wales-Wide Web

Belated International Workers Day greetings (no connection at home at the moment). thsi picture was taken on the demonstration in Bremen, Germany.

Technorati Tags: MayDay

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | Caught in the middle of a net revolution:

'Intermediaries can be cut out of the supply chain for things that you don't need to see before buying'. Thoughtful piece in the Guardian by Victor Keegan, who while pondering on why banks and estate agents haven't yet been caught up in the "new revolution, concludes "this bottom-up revolution.... is unleashing a tidal wave of creativity around the world."

What about education. The net revolution is unleashing a tidal wave of creativity in learning but it is bypassing the education system. Keegan draws attention to the research by Pew which has found that 57% of US teenagers created their own content for the net in the form of pictures, music and so forth.

Now comes the crunch point. Is the education system just another intermediary which will be swept aside. I am not sure. I increasingly fear so. At the very least the education system is going to have to change radically to accommodate and support more creative forms of learning.

Technorati Tags: medialiteracy, pedagogy

An instant answer to my last post in the form of an article cited in OL Daily (welcome back Stephen). The Becta guide cited in the article talks of a lesson using ICT in a UK school.

For today's class we will be building a 3D map of the village. First, we'll collect pictures, sounds and anything else of interest from each street. Split into teams of four and take your camera-phones with you. By mid-day we will have built our own virtual map, and then we can get together to plan which parts to research further.

As Stephen says:

Forget math and geography and one-hour classes. Move out of the classroom and into the real world. Connected and mobile, integrated into society and learning about it.

If every school lesson was like this I would be much more confident about the future of education systems.

Technorati Tags: e-learning, education and training research, medialiteracy, pedagogy

I have only read the abstract for this paper but am sufficently interested to have printed the whole paper for weekend reading (curious that I still prefer reading on paper to on-screen for anything but shortish newspaper articles).

However I think there is a very important point made here. I fear that the so called open access movement for journals - which effectively switches who pays - but not the fundamental economic relations - is doing a disservice to the wider open content movement. Scientific content should be freely available and can be through electronic publishing.

Jean Valsiner says:

I claim that what is called "open access" is actually a transformed form of traditional ("closed") access, and is "open" only by its obviously appealing label. As a re-organizational move of institutionalized kind, it benefits the economically powerful—usually "first world" based—research groups and corporations, and leads to new economic limits for the publication of innovative research emanating from less affluent researchers and laboratories. By shifting the costs of scientific publication from the recipients (journal subscribers) to the authors of published articles, "open access" creates a social scenario of one-sided information flow rather than a new form of "openness" in scholarly communication. By monopolizing the sources of scientific communication the "open access" initiative defeats its stated purpose.

Technorati Tags: Open content

The absolutely central thing to understand here is that production logic of the industrial era is changing from centralized (central IP control, centralized production, controlled distribution, few developers) to decentralized (decentralized production, distributed costs, lots of developers, IP in the commons). The driver here is that as you benefit from the commons, you are likely to contribute something back to the commons. This is technically enabled by the licensing, which often requires that you give the next person the same rights you received in the first hand. It’s a gift economy, but driven by economical benefits. It supports free markets by creating an open market, rather than a closed market.

There are two ways of looking at this. One is to argue that Open Source and Open Content represents 'merely' a new form of market organisation under capitalism. And of course for many companies that is what it is - I am unsure mind that IBM licensing under the GPL represents a 'gift economy'.

On the other hand a lot of the work done on Open Content and Open Source is freely given and is undertaken in peoples own free time. I don't think think this is part of a capitalist market economy at all. Is this possible under capitalism. It seems to me there have always been instances of meaningful and socially valuable activities undertaken in the period of capitalism but for which no market value as such has been asked for or ascribed.

The big move in the last 10 years or so has been to attempt to place a market or exchange value on everything - including, critically knowledge. It is juts this move which has driven the attempts to extend IPR.

We should celebrate activity which takes place outside the bounds of the market, rather than try to recognise market value. (Incidentally this is why I disagree with those trying to introduce LETS systems - or barter systems for software and content development. these represent a market economy using time as cash - rather than cash itself for exchanging goods. But it is the same thing at the end of the day).

Would welcome any other opinions on this.

Technorati Tags: Open content, Open source, OSS

John Naughton - my favourite newspaper IT pundit, has written an article about the problems Microsoft has hit in introducing a new operating system.

"The really interesting comparison", he says...

...is with Linux, a product of comparable complexity developed by an independent, dispersed community of programmers who communicate mainly over the net. How come they can outperform a stupendously rich company that can afford to employ very smart people and give them all the resources they need?

Here's a possible answer: complexity. Modern operating systems are staggeringly complicated. In terms of the number of their components, and the richness of the interactions between them, they are far more complex than an Airbus or a jumbo jet.

Microsoft's problems with Windows may be an indicator that operating systems are getting beyond the capacity of any single organisation to handle them. Whatever other charges might be levelled against Microsoft, technical incompetence isn't one. If the folks at Redmond can't do it, maybe it just can't be done.

Therein may lie the real significance of Open Source. In a perceptive book published in 2004, the social scientist, Steve Weber argued that it's not Linux per se but the collaborative process by which the software was created that is the real innovation. In those terms, Linux is probably the first truly networked enterprise in history.

Weber likened Open Source production to an earlier process which had a revolutionary impact - Toyota's production system - which in time transformed the way cars are made everywhere. The Toyota 'system', in that sense, was not a car, and it was not uniquely Japanese. Similarly, Open Source is not a piece of software, and it is not unique to a group of hackers. It's a way of building complex things. Microsoft's struggles with Vista suggest it may be the only way to do operating systems in future.

Technorati Tags: Open source, OSS

Not so often that any sustained discussion takes place in this blog - more is the pity. But there is a bit of a discourse taking place here.

I am posting my latest reply to Fredrik Adlemo to make the discussion more visible.

"It may be that rather than move straight to Perosnal Learning Environments we will move to a half way type solution between VLEs and PLEs. The big question for me is ownership. VLEs are at the end of the day institutionally controlled. PLEs are learner controlled. This effects the relationship between the learner and the 'teacher' as mediated through the institution. In a PLE the teacher is only one of a number of possible 'peers' involved in the learning process and the institution one of a number fo different contexts in which learning takes place.
If I sound confused it is becuase I am!

But more confusing still, I think, is the relationship of currilcum to learning. So far I think we have attempted to represent trandtional curriculum through the use of ICT. I increasingly feel we need to see a dialectical relationship between the form of learning and the subject of learning as represnted in curriculum. So we need new tools and processes for learning - sure - but we also need new forms of the subject of learning in terms of curriculum."

Technorati Tags: e-learning, e-portfolios, Personal_Learning_Environments, social software

I subscribe to the excellent Labour Start List server. They run many campaigns on behalf of trade unions and trade unionists all over the world. All are important. But occasionally one of these campaigns stands out as needing every bit of publicity it can get. So please do respond - and please pass on this appeal for support.

"Back in February we launched a campaign in support of six jailed trade union
leaders in Indonesia. They were employed by a company called Musim Mas, the
world's largest manufacturer of palm oil.

As always happens in these cases, the response -- initially quite large -- has
dropped down considerably. Now only a trickle of messages are reaching the
Indonesian government. Possibly, some bureaucrat there is telling his boss,
"Don't worry -- we hardly hear any more about those jailed unionists. We can
let them rot. The world has already forgotten them."

But we have not forgotten them. The union chairperson, Robin Kimbi, and the
regional secretary, Masry Sebayang, got two years in prison. Fourteen months
terms were given to union leaders Suyahman, Safrudin, Akhen Pane and Sruhas
Towo.

Their "crime" was to exercise their mandate as union leaders. They are
prisoners of conscience.

We have not forgotten them, and we will not let this issue drop.

Last week, Amnesty International called on its members around the world to
raise their voices in protest against the jailing of the Musim Mas trade
unionists.

And unions around the world are taking up the cause.

The Nestle European Works Council, representing 80,000 company employees, has written to the company to express concern over the possible presence of Musim Mas palm oil and oleochemicals in Nestle products.

The German Food and Allied Workers NGG and the Dutch FNV Bondgenoten have echoed the public call by the Unilever European Works Council for Unilever to distance itself from Musim Mas and publicly reveal its sources for the palm oil
in company products.

And the global union federation representing food workers, the IUF (at whose
request we launched our campaign) has now begun to raise money for the struggle through its International Musim Mas Defense Fund.

Momentum is growing again. A three-month old campaign, no longer "fresh", is
attracting attention. The Indonesian government is going to have to start paying attention.

Please do these 3 simple things today:

1. Send off your message of protest:

http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=76

2. Donate generously to the International Musim Mas Defense Fund:

http://www.iuf.org/cgi-bin/dbman/db.cgi db=default&uid=default&ID=3231&view_rec
ords=1&ww=1&en=1

3. Spread the word in your workplace and union. Forward on this email message!

In the international trade union movement we do not forget those who languish
in prisons for our cause.

This campaign continues.

Solidarity forever!"

Technorati Tags: labourstart

As regular readers of the blog will know, my main research interest is the pedagogy of e-learning. for some time I have been inching forward towards trying to develop a new and more expansive understanding of the way in which we can use ICT for learning - particularly in vocational education and training. This is my latest paper on the subject. It is only a beta edition - but in the best spirit of web 2, I am publishing it in the hope of feedback and help from the community.

Despite considerable research and investment, the sponsorship of many pilot programmes and projects and policy initiatives, e-learning has been less influential and successful than was predicted in education and training. Although there are substantial differences between sectors and organisations, in general the use of ICT for learning in vocational education and training has tendered to be confined within islands of good practice. That practice has not as a whole entered the mainstream, at least within the more developed education and training systems. It should be noted however, that in those countries with less developed institutional systems, and those countries and regions with difficult geography, poor communication infrastructure or with low population densities there has often been more use of ICT for learning.

There have been a number of studies into barriers to the development of e-learning. Commonly ascribed reasons are lack of ICT infrastructure, cost, the lack of appropriate and localised learning materials and resistance or lack of confidence on the part of teachers and trainers (Schuermann et al, Attwell 2003a). More recently, there has been an increased focus on the issue of pedagogic approaches to the use of ICT for learning. Despite this welcome development, such studies tend to be limited by a technologically determinist approach (Attwell et al, 2003b).

Moreover, most studies fail to appreciate the different factors and relationships in play. Any consideration of the use of ICT for learning or the potential of new technologies requires an understanding of the relationship between the subject of vocational education and training, the processes of learning and the nature of applied knowledge and skills in an occupational setting and the context of their application. This is especially so for work based learning. This is a much more complex relationship than the use of ICT for the acquisition of general (non-occupational) learning.

This short paper will explore those relationships. It will start with a short snapshot of the previous use of ICT for learning in vocational education and training. It will go on to consider the different ways in which people are using ICT for informal learning and will suggest an emergent pedagogy based on ‘making’ or ‘doing’. It will examine new technological developments - Web 2.0 and the advent of ubiquitous computing. The paper suggests that these developments could lead to a new approach to didactics, overcoming the divide or duality between theory or academic knowledge and practice or the skills based application of knowledge (a duality with its roots in the Renaissance (Rauner, 1997)). However, the adoption of such transformational didactic approaches, requires not only the adoption of new technologies for learning and new pedagogic approaches but also new approaches to the organisation of vocational education and training and to curriculum.

Technorati Tags: e-learning , pedagogy , work based learning

I have been boring all my friends with my podcasting craze. Its such fun making the podcasts. some two weeks ago I put up what I called a beta.

Well here is the sequel and I am fairly happy with the results.

Sounds of the Bazaar No. 2

This week Graham Attwell spends time providing further reflections on ePortfolios and Personal Learning Environments. Due to the feedback received after last weeks Sounds of the Bazaar, he has plenty to talk about!

This week also sees the introduction of two new regular features:

Blogspot and Website of the week.

There is also the first in a series of interviews.

This week Graham interviews Georg Spottl.

If you want to listen to the whole programme but can’t wait to hear a particular segment, here are the start times for each section:

1:20 mins

Further reflections on the development of ePortfolios and PLE’s

7:04 mins

Website of the week

8:30 mins

Interview

15:40 mins

Blogspot

17:03 mins

Wrap up

To listen to the broadcast head over to the bazaar web site.

For those only wanting certain sections of the broadcast the individual segments are available on the site.

I am going to try to produce Sounds of the Bazaar on a fortnightly basis. If you have ideas about future features on the programme or would like a plug for your project or research then please get in touch.

Technorati Tags: e-portfolios, education and training research, podcasts

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | A sidestep in the right direction:

I love the creativity of the new breed of projects seeking to use geomapping technologies of open content. In the UK the main mapmakers are the Ordnance Survey, now a privatised concern, who guard their copyright over data. Now there is a new initiative to create maps in the public domain.

It is also raising interesting questions about how we look at maps and other forms of digital data and how up to date data needs to be.

"Steer is taking part in an attempt to map the Isle of Wight's roads in one weekend for OpenStreetMap.org, a website that helps create maps free for anyone to use for any purpose (See http://tinyurl.com/ny84m). If Ordnance Survey and other national agencies will not make their data freely available, then OpenStreetMap, developed over the past two years, will re-collect it from scratch."

Technorati Tags: Copyright, Open content, Open source

I am making a presentation at the Social Skills through Social Software workshop in Salzburg next week. My presentation has the rather trendy tile of 'Educational Technology is NOT Neutral - Chancen und Risiken von ePortfolio Design'.
Here is the abstract for the presentation. You can also download a PDF version of my slides.

Background and context of the presentation

E-learning is a young technology and the study of e-learning is equally in its infancy. Despite this there is by now an extensive literature on the subject and learning technology is increasingly recognised as a discipline in itself. However the overwhelming majority of these studies, from both proponents and sceptics, have been technologically determinist, based on the potentials and effects of technologies on education and learning, rather than looking at the influence of learning and teaching on technology.

The forms and uses of technologies are shaped by political and social processes. If learning is a social process, then any consideration of the development and impact of e-learning and e-learning technologies needs to examine the wider social, economic and cultural processes and discourses involved in the development and implementation of new technologies in education.

Three dominant policy discourses in education have shaped the development and implementation of e-learning: commodification, privatization and a restricted discourse of lifelong learning, which in turn are based on broader discourses around globalization and the privatization of knowledge (Attwell, forthcoming).

Such dominant discourses have tended towards limiting the impact of ICT within the mainstream education and training systems and of holding back the development of new didactic and pedagogic approaches within formal learning.

Even the development of individual learning portfolios has been inhibited by the desire to control and commodify learning. Rather than learners being encouraged to develop an account of all their learning experiences, many systems constrain the recording and reflection on learning to the learning outcomes prescribed by the curriculum and by the desire to present the results of the portfolio in a standard way.

However, the changing ways in which young people are using computers for learning and the increasing use of ICt for informal learning is leading to new pedagogic possibilities and opportunities for new didactic approaches to education and training. Ubiquitous computing and social software have the potential to support such a new approach to learning and an expanded pedagogical idea of e-portfolios.
Objectives
The objectives of the presentation are:

• To explain the links between political and social processes and the development of use of e-learning technologies

• To examine how young people are using computers for learning

• To examine how computers are being used for informal learning

• To consider the implications of these changes for pedagogic and didactic approaches to formal education and training

• To consider how social software can be used to support new pedagogic and didactic approaches to education and training.

Conclusions
To utilise the opportunities for new forms of didactics will require profound reform in education and training systems and practice and new responsibilities and roles for teachers and trainers.

Two requirements stand out. The first is the need for wider and more flexible occupational profiles capable of being shaped both by the learners and by the requirements of changing technologies and work processes. It is striking that through informal learning in SMEs learners were able to develop new and emergent occupational practice, building on previous learning and shaping the use of new technologies in the work process.

The second involves the structure and form of the curriculum. Present formal e-learning is largely context free, is usually subject based, and is sequenced by teachers and trainers. Above all e-learning is driven by the demands of the education process, rather than by the demands of the work process. A new didactical approach requires curricula based on a holistic understanding of work processes, allowing learners to create and make as they learn and to engage in a community of practice through their activities and understanding of those activities. In this way the subject of learning and the process of learning can be brought together developing new and dynamic forms of ‘applied knowledge’ or ‘work process knowledge’ as both the subject and object of learning.

Further reading
Jeremny Hiebert’s blog - Headspace
Graham Attwell’s blog - The Wales-Wide Web
John Seely Brown’s web site
The Personal Learning Environments Blog.

Technorati Tags: e-learning, e-portfolios

I am just about to embark on one of my periodic trips around Europe. If anyone would like to meet up - and even better if anyone would like to (or be willing to) be interviewed for the Sounds of the Bazaar podcast, please get in touch.

Here is the schedule:

23 - 24 May

Social Software conference, Salzburg

29 - 30 May

VQTS project workshop, Hilvershum

2 June

UK edubloggers workshop, London

6 - 7 June

Personnel Learning Environments workshops, Manchester

8 -9 June

Open Culture workshop, Como

10 June

KM Plus project workshop, Bremen

12- 13 June

Jisc meeting, Bristol

19 - 20 June

Interests and Desires project meeting (I kid you not, that really is the name of the project) - somewhere in France

And in between lots of work! Just get in touch if you will be around at any of these meetings and would like a chat.

O I am in Salzburg for the 'Social software - Social skills' workshop organised by Salzburg research.

It is in a beautiful conference centre called St Virgil, just outside Salzburg. Arrived just in time for lunch and got into interesting discussion with Wolfgang Greller from the University of Klagenfurt and Helen Barret.

Wolfgang is organising professional development at his university. He has developed parallel tracks - including self learning and coaching for staff in the university,. He finds that it is the women who overwhelmingly choose personal coaching whilst them men prefer the self learning route.

This led to a wider discussion on gender differences and how it relates to portfolios.

Anyway at some point I got the microphone up and running and recorded most of the discussion. Will edit in the train next week and hopefully you will be able to listen to the discussion in the next Sounds of the Bazaar,

Later today I am interviewing Shane Sutherland from the Pebble Pad portfolio project at Wolverhampton University and my old frond, Wilfred Rubens who is involved in organising Dutch edubloggers, amongst other things.

Technorati Tags: blogging, e-portfolios, social software

This is the first of two posts about the excellent Social software - Social Learning conference in Salzburg. In a later post, I will make a few general comments about the conference, which I greatly enjoyed. In this post I provide notes on what the keynote speakers said. It is a sort of asynchronous live blog. I would love to blog these events live but my typing is just too poor! I do not know how much sense these notes will make to those not there, but hope they provide a flavour of some of the issues discussed.
The first contribution was by John Erpenbeck. John is XXX. His presentation was entitled something like (translating from the German title "Learning cultures for competence development".
He presented a discourse on knowledge and the nature of competence and how the uses of social software can develop and support what he sees as real competence as opposed to "expert knowledge."
John said that values can bridge non knowledge,

He said the German Dual system of apprenticeship and training had been developed on the idea of expert knowledge - this was an illusion - we always need socially based values which are not correct or incorrect but valid or not valid.
He distinguished between the learning of values and valuing learning...he said we have to evaluate a situation and act - whether that acting was seen as successful or not was due to social recognition or not - this is a social issue -values become social.
Values he said are not valuable unless transferred into our own emotions. This was core to the development of competence - in competence development you make certain values your own in order to act - competence had nothing to do with expert knowledge.
John said traditional e-learning has nothing to do with competence development - it is just "monologues" - with exceptions like Sim City, e-learningis just a transfer of expert knowledge. The other exception is learning by computer specialists who are learning in the process of working.
We need e-learning from which we have the potential to establish and open conflicts which "labelise" (think the translator might have got this wrong) the emotional basis and when a problem is solved it is made our own and internalised - this is how we really develop competencies.
The trend for blended learning recognises the deficit in e-learning - the need for emotions included into real social context.
John went on to say that web 2 - blogs, wikis etc. - directly introduce opinions and emotions - blogs about aesthetics, attitudes, teenagers talking about attitudes to love, jealousy etc. (this communication can be used to evaluate knowledge and discuss knowledge - and critically to communicate vales.

The web 2 model can also time shift - it is a conversation model and open to evaluations.

If Web 1, he said was based on the knowledge of experts, Web 2 is based in the wisdom of the masses.

For metadata Web 1 was based on a hierarchy established by experts whilst Web 2 which allows us to add our own tags, determine our own semantics and evaluate our own emotions, introduce evaluations on a meta level into the dialogue.

In Web 1 the teacher decides the content of learning. Web 2 is based on self organised memory (memory is always determined by knowledge).In Web 2 self reflection is encouraged.
I am not sure I always understood what John was saying but it feels right to me.
Helen Barrett from the University of Anchorage spoke next.
She said a personal lifetime web space might be more appropriate than an e-Portfolio. She went on to say that evidence of our competence is part of our personal archive system - the challenge or problem is the danger of a hard drive crash. How do back up and store all this stuff.

Helen said self knowledge is an outcome of learning - she counter-posed a learning portfolio to the assessment portfolio).
Summative portfolios, she said were an assessment of learning. Formative assessment was assessment for learning
Helen promotes the use of a portfolio to tell a story because this is where she sees reflection as being based.
The final keynote presentation - "Smarter, Simpler, Social" was by Lee Bryant from Headshift Internet Consulting in London.
Lee said the highly structured, sequential nature of learning systems and software hinders our ability to look around the periphery and stops us using intuition.

He saw web logs as sense making networks

He said different social software tools have different action spaces, different modes of interaction, can be used in different contexts and have different learning curves - we need to provide a diverse range of tools and allow people to dip in and use what they like and what suits the context - the development of hybrid systems is likely.

Different users will have different combinations of tools.
He promoted a web of links - which provides an organisational and social immune system and bypasses the hubs.

The internet was originally built on a gift economy, he said and the gift economy is good for business.
It is unusual to get three great presentation in one session at a conference. You can find the presentation on the web here.

Technorati Tags: describing knowledge, e-learning, e-portfolios, edublogs, eportfolio, social software

The second post on the Social Skills - Social Software conference.

I was trying to work out why I enjoyed this event so much.one thing was great people and great conversations- hi to Sebastion - both of them, John, Wilfred, Siegfried, Wolgang, Helen, Lee, Cecile and Veronica and her colleagues from Salzburg research. Sorry if I missed anyone out.

The food was good and the beer was free, that always helps.

But most important I think was a sense of community and common purpose which is missing at the big educational technology conferences. Sebastion and me talked about this. he said he now only goes to the small conferences. Why pay ridiculous amounts of money for events like Educa Berlin when you can gain eral ideas form events such as Salzburg.

The second point was the buzz about social software. Yes, I know there are some interesting pilot applications in the UK. But in Austria they seem to have taken social software to heart. Austria, like Germany, has been slow in implementing educational technology. The theory of uneven and combined development says that hen a country does adopt a technology is bypasses previous stages of development and jumps in at the cutting edge. Could it be that Austria is going to bypass those dire years of Learning management Systems and focus on new pedagogies using social software? It certainly looks possible.

One last point about the Salzburg conference. It was amazingly well organised. And Veronica seemed so calm. I wish I could do that.

Technorati Tags: describing knowledge, e-portfolios, social software