The Wales-Wide Web

Sorry I've been so quiet lately. I have been traveling endlessly and then returned home to write a funding application (more on that tomorrow).

But at last today I've found a bit of time to return to doing some more creative work - blogging and writing an outline of a two day workshop. The workshop is for the EU funded MOSEP project (incidentally if you've been there before and were not impressed do take another look. The site has been completely redesigned and is beginning to look pretty cool). The MOSEP project is researching, developing and piloting e-Portfolios - designed for use by 14-19 year old socially disadvantaged young people. The main output of the work will be a handbook (I'm still struggling to complete the first draft of that) and a series of workshops for teachers and trainers about e-Portfolios. I am responsible for the main module. This is intended as a two day face to face workshop.

 I have written the a first draft of the Main Module on the project wiki. I have not done the timings yet but suspect I may have to reduce some of the activities slightly. I would love some feedback from you. The activities may not be quite transparent (there are some fairly oblique references to some of the activities which I will try and clarify int he next few days)- but you can get a feel for the issues I am covering. Is the balance about right? Have I missed out any important issues?

Thsi blog is currently syndicated on the JISC Community Emerge site. I wonder if anyone in that community is working on e-Portfolios and would like to collaborate with me. Whilst this version is written for workshop delivery it  would be quite simple to write another version intended for self learning - and very worthwhile i think. One issue is availability.  I would love to make it available through some of the Open Content sites - say Open Learn and Connexions. But this is where the standards issue comes into play. These sites use completely different standards. It will be a pain  writing different versions. Does anyone have any good ideas. I could produce a version in Learning Design - but am unconvinced how useful that would be. The workshop and all materials will be published under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license.

I know the comment function on the Wales Wide Web is not really working (sometimes comments do get through but most times they don't). If any of you do have comments or would like to work with me on this could you leave a comment on my Emerge bog or on my MOSEP project blog.

There's a lot of discussion at the moment about Communities of Practice. On the Emerge site Neil Witt writes in a contribution headed 'I Community therefore I Practice'

"OK, what is it with COPs?

Why is there an assumption that just because you have a community of made up of random individuals that you have a CoP? How can anyone “set up a CoP” ? Surely they evolve from a community?."

Last weekend I was at a workshop in Bucharest organised by the Work and Learning Together project. The project is aiming to set up sixteen (!) different CoPs in the tourist and travel sector.

So far it is a pretty mixed picture. Some are going well - some are yet to get off the ground. We held a quick brainstorm on what works and what doesn't and why. This was the conclusions (thanks to Sanne Akkerman for the notes):

Underlying difficulties:

• Do they feel a need / problem?
• Do they believe in the idea that COPs can be useful for their company? (win-win situation)
• Do they believe in sharing with competing companies?
• Do they identify at all with the sector/with each other? Are you seeking for the right target group? Just the fact that they belong to the same group, doesn’t mean that they want to be a community.

      - Not be able to share together?

      - Are they in competition?

• Do they believe in internet as writing/contributing medium as opposed to information source? Do they believe in internet at all?
  

Lessons learned:

It takes time

• Don't look with too narrow criteria at what constitutes the COP and the success of it. A group can be COP like, despite lack of virtual communication and visibility for us. 
• Think of the participants both in terms of

      - practice

      - geographical relations. This is a way how they can feel related.

• Find concrete shared activities (instead of 'you do A, so I do A too', think together, 'you do A, so I do B', or even 'together we can do C'  (produce packages).
• Find a field where there is a need / problem
• Use your personal relations and social networks to organize first meeting/activities
• Create ownership immediately based on shared need, recognition and feeling 'important' (food & wine; serieus talking). Key factor is motivation and belief.
• Make clear they are expert in some aspects, for other aspects we (as project partners) are experts
• Create recognition that all companies are unique, have their specificity (e.g. have meetings at each company). Let them define how each of them are special.
• Offer technical support (e.g. informal training courses on ICT);
• Access to internet, habit to use internet. Perhaps associations can have intermediary roles in providing access.
• Not only  virtual environment; face to face meetings & Skype. Importance of social presence.
• When a COP already exists, try to add on what they already have and do. Add supporting tools
• Try to have the additional tools look and feel the same as they are familiar with
• Top-down vs bottom-up approach. Bottom-up is important for ownership and self-sustainability, but top-down can also be used if there is a central organization that already does a lot of work in the field. Top-down may be a way in. Depends what type of central organization / association it is and how participants relate to it.
• Use COP in already existing framework (does not necessarily have to be a COP). E.g. in training activities and networks, where people already meet regularly.

I guess the most important observation was the importance of social presence. Elmo D'Angelis talked about how in Italy they had held several evening events with food and wine. This has helped break the ice and the CoPs there are really taking off. Finding the key individuals was seen as important too. But it was noted that where official organisations took ownership - Tourist Associations for instance, there was generally little take up. Ownership was seen as the critical issue. And I guess this is one of the lessons for Emerge. If the CoP is to work it has to be seen and felt as belonging to the members and not as an 'official' JISC site.

I spent three days last week writing an application for a new project for the EU Lifelong Learning programme. It is about developing and implementing web 2.0 and social software for collaboration between different projects and for project dissemination.

I do not enjoy writing funding application - but then who does? And at the end of the day it always seems a bit of a lottery as to what gets funded and what doesn"t.  I have written some applications which I thought were great and got turned right down - whilst others which I thought were pretty crap and which got approved. There's probably no easy answer to this.

But one thing I think can be changed is what is required to produce an application. the EU Lifelong Learning form is truly dreadful. It requires endless forms to be filled in for each work package and each output, providing endless data on things like the educational qualification level of the person who might use a particular product.

Just so you don't think I am an endless moaner - I think the UK HE JISC application procedure is pretty good. JISC forms are limited to 6 to 10 pages and any extra pages are discarded. OK - it can be difficult to get ideas expressed clearly in such a brief format. But they don't ask for days of effort in filling in bureaucratic nonsense for someones monitoring database which is never actually used for anything.

Be interested if anyone has any ideas on how to develop a creative project applciation procedure which can addto the development fo ideas and knowledge whilst still being fair to appilcants.

I am in Salzburg speaking at the 3rd Interdisciplinary EduMedia Conference 'Open Education enhanced by Web 2.0!?! Open Educational Practices and Resources for Lifelong Learning'.

I have good friends working for salzburg Research who have organised the conference and salzburg is one of my favourite cities, so I readily agreed to speak at the confernce. then as sometimes happens, I didn't get my act together to tell them the topic I wanted to talk on. So Diana Bischof, the very capable conference organiser, seems to have allocated me a title. Fair enough. So I am speaking on - wait for it - 'Open content in the internet as link between learning, knowledge and development'. Or something like that.

Anyway what I am really speaking on is a subject that I have been thinking much on lately - the direction, momentum and impact of the Open Educational Resources movement.

My general conclusion is that whilst the OER movement has been successful in raising the conciousness of both institutions and teachers about sharing resources, the reality is that there is very limited use and still less reuse or repurposing of OERs. The major issue is that OERs are largely seen as teaching materials. Many of the projects funded by Hewlett - and the EU - have essentially funded large universities to support their staff in posting their teaching materials on the internet. That is very much to be welcomed but it does little for learning. If we want to support learning and that is the openness I am interested in - then we need to provide learners with tools to learn - regardless of whether they are registered with an educational institution. At the same time we need to recognise learning which takes place outside the institutions. Recognition means what it says - it is not a synonym for accreditation. So we are back to Personal Learning Environments - a theme any regular reader to thsi column will be quite familiar with. The problem is that institutions have no interest in supporting learning outside the walls - indeed if learning was to be so open why will anyone pay fees to attend universities.

Finally I am getting to think about the different ways in which we might use social software as a medium for accessing Open Educational Resources - more on this later in the week.

My presentation is available on slideshare - though I am not sure how much sense it makes without the words to go with it.

Firstly, apologies to those of you who have emailed me about different entries in this blog and have not yet had a reply. I am struggling with a mountain of work and will try to get back to everyone by the end of next week.

Over the weekend a worked on editing the paper I produced on Personal Learning Environments for the TenCompetence conference in Manchester in January. It is going to be published somewhere - not quite sure where. I had a bit of a struggle with the review notes.

The reviewer said ". The call was for papers of 2000 words, and while some degree of flexibility is acceptable, your paper is well over the limit. Please reduce the word count to 2500 excluding abstract and references."

Hm - the original was 8000 words so certainly was over the limit.

But then she or he went on to say:"In making this revision please give greater prominence to the SME study, and discuss it in greater depth. If there are empirical findings, please present these in a well organised form, as they may provide a basis for defining the new pedagogy, activities and policies which you are seeking to define."

A little tricky. But in the end quite helpful as it forced me to consider which were the really important arguments for the PLE. And my conclusion was that "The most compelling argument for the PLE is to develop educational technology which can respond to the way people are using technology for learning and which allows them to themselves shape their own learning spaces, to form and join communities and to create, consume, remix, and share material. "

I'm copying the whole paper into this blog. Despite the blog software getting a bit creaky these days the print view does work quite sweetly. If you read the original there is not really anything new (although I have all the references properly done now) - if you didn't (shame on you) then I would love to hear your comments.

Introduction
A recent article in Wired (Andrews, 2007) talked of “a shift from aging, top-down classroom technologies like Blackboard to what e-learning practitioners call personal learning environments - mashup spaces comprising del.icio.us feeds, blog posts, podcast widgets - whatever resources students need to document, consume or communicate their learning across disciplines.’
The article reflects the growing interest in the educational technology community in Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) as the next wave of innovation in Technology Enhanced Learning.

In previous papers I have sought to explain PLEs as a concept rather than as a technology based application. Such a concept is rooted in social and pedagogic development. In this paper I will briefly explore some of these developments and focus on the changing ways in which we are using technology for learning. This, I will argue, is the main driving force which should inform the shaping of next generation learning environments.

Over the last year I have made a series of short videos as part of the European Commission sponsored ASSIPA course. The videos are based on original footage shot at a face to face course. You can find all of the videos linked through the ASSIPA wiki pages (I will write more about ASSIPA next week.


The first video I edited was of a 'coins exercise' - designed to show in a practical way how good and bad teaching impacts on learners. It was great material but took me ages to do - and I still got the aspect ration wrong. Still, I was very attached to this movie. And then one day I logged on to my Google account form a strange computer. Pressed a couple of buttons (in German) and realised I had said I refused to accept Google's conditions. How does Goggle react - they instantly delete all your videos! Oh well, I thought - I will have to upload the videos again - and that is what I did. Except I couldn't find a copy of the coins video anywhere. I must have inadvertently culled it in one of my periodic attempts to get rid of old bits of old video.

Well I though about remaking the video but couldn't quite summons up the heart to do it. And then last week I was talking with Woif Hilzensauer at Salzburg airport and he told me how much he liked the video. Ah - I said - its a shame but I lost it. I've got a copy on my iPod he said. And so he had. So I copied it to my computer and it is back up on Google again. So - if you would like to watch the video after such a long intro - just click here.

There's hope for digital preservation yet.