The Wales-Wide Web

In an hour I am off to the Alt C conference in Nottingham.

I am chairing a session on international Communities of Practice.

There is a bit of a strange history to this session. We originally submitted a proposal for a symposium,. However it was knocked back. We could, the programme committee said, have a short paper session - 20 minutes. Now the problem - how to fit three presentations into twenty minutes and still have time for discussion.

We decided each presenter should have a two minute video slot. So here are the results - surprisingly it seems to work - each makes a good point in only 2 minutes.

But first the overview - this is the blurb from the application (written by George Roberts).

"Communities exist on many scales and few communities can truly be called communities of practice (CoP) in the strict and elaborated sense as used by Lave and Wenger. Through purposeful engagement with CoPs people progress from a state of peripheral participation towards a state of mastery of the forms and norms
of the CoP (see: Dewey, 1933; Goodman, 2003; Lave & Wenger, 1991;
Leont'ev, 1978; Wenger, 1998). This journey is sometimes mirrored by progression in formal education, but as often as not is supported by episodes of informal learning. This may take place in institutions, but more often occurs in the workplace, the home, the community centre and other spaces. At each stage the
learner needs to establish their co-ordinates through a process of establishing self-identity within a community.

The application of CoP theory in instrumental circumstances almost always presumes the pre-existence of groups who share community of practice attributes. Communities of practice are emergent organisations with tacit but clearly identifiable rules and other signs of identity: shared goals, shared values, shared symbolic artefacts. These may be codified but as often as not tacit community rules transgress or subvert codified, formal rules. We start from the position that although it now commonplace to recognise the existence of CoPs, the processes underpinning their development are still poorly understood. In particular, it has been found to be difficult in practice to create or facilitate the development of CoPs.

As a move towards better understanding of community formation, facilitation and development, this symposium will consider three emergent international educational communities of practice working both in and through Web2.0 environments."

And now to the videos.

First up is George Roberts whose presentation is entitled 'Emerging Oxymorons'

Second is Karsten Wolf who presents 'Communities of Practice in World of Warcraft'.

The third presentation is 'Communities of Practice and Identities' by Tore Hoel.

Hope you enjoy them.

Technorati Tags: communities of practice

At the UK ALT-C conference for last two days.

Great fun meeting everyone, drinking too much, talking lots etc.

Not overimpressed with many of the sessions though. To my mind far too many of the papers are not sufficiently challenging - and too much is being accepted at face value. (If this sounds too negative, Josie has just pointed out to me teh food is better than last year).

But this morning I did go to a great session run by Josie, Helen and Frances. The session was a Web 2.0 slam. After a brief and entertaining introduction to Web 2.0 tools and their uses pairs participants were asked to make a short (two minute) performance about some aspect of Web 2.0.

And very good the contributions were too. Great fun, lots of participation, lots of getting to know people - hi Sabina and Nicola - and we got to learn things too.

Anyway - if you missed the session or weren't at the conference here is the session wiki - and links to videos of each presentation should be available in the next couple of hours.

Technorati Tags: ALTC2007, social software

At the UK ALT-C conference for last two days.

Great fun meeting everyone, drinking too much, talking lots etc.

Not overimpressed with many of the sessions though. To my mind far too many of the papers are not sufficiently challenging - and too much is being accepted at face value. (If this sounds too negative, Josie has just pointed out to me teh food is better than last year).

But this morning I did go to a great session run by Josie, Helen and Frances. The session was a Web 2.0 slam. After a brief and entertaining introduction to Web 2.0 tools and their uses pairs participants were asked to make a short (two minute) performance about some aspect of Web 2.0.

And very good the contributions were too. Great fun, lots of participation, lots of getting to know people - hi Sabina and Nicola - and we got to learn things too.

Anyway - if you missed the session or weren't at the conference here is the session wiki - and links to videos of each presentation should be available in the next couple of hours.

Technorati Tags: ALTC2007, social software

I'm not short our ideas for blog posts at the moment. But I am short of time. And blogging takes time. But hopefully in the next few days I will have some opportunities to get some of these ideas off my chest. And I've still got notes form last weeks Alt C conference which I promised to write up.

For now you will have to content yourself with this picture from the Emerge island ins Second Life. the jukebox connects to the different podcasts I have been making as part of the Emerge project. (If you do visit the island the jukebox has now been moved to an exhibition centre in the star floating over the island(.

I love it. maybe it is flattery. But i am beginning to see the real potential of Multi User virtual environments such as Second Life, not for replicating classrooms on line, but for infomal discourse and learning.

More on this soon - I'm working on some ideas.

Technorati Tags: podcasts, SecondLife

Sorry for the lack of entries lately. In the middle of a big re-organisation of Pontydysgu. Many greetings to Peter who has joined us to run the administration. And Dirk is working hard on the launch of our new website. Meanwhile I am hurtling from meeting to meeting.

But there is still time for the odd post here. Some time ago I posted the following question on my Facebook page:

"How can we support informal learning?"

At least I thought I did. What I actually posted was "How can we support informal earning?" What a difference a consonant makes. Well, George Roberts answered the original question:

" I support informal earning through car boot sales and Russian MP3 download sites. CAVEAT: The support of informal earning is illegal, immoral and (I hear) the basis of the economy of Liverpool ;)"

And then I edited the question to my original intent.

Here is a summary of the answers. Thanks to all of you who contributed.

Scott Wilson
Stop hoarding stuff behind passwords and firewalls. Respect informal learning by universally supporting accreditation via APEL.

Jenny Hughes
Who's 'we' ? And what informal learning are we supporting by whom? There's quite a lot of informal learning I wouldn't want to support, ditto a lot of informal learners

Cristina Costa

By creating, enhancing, developing and maintaining a learning environment where participants (not students!) are entitled to an opinion, stimulated to develop their own voice and share what they know while LEARNING what they want to learn!

Steve Wheeler

By giving them licence to use more (any type of) social networking

George Roberts
Once it's supported is it informal? John Cook proposed a continuum: informal (off the radar) via semi-formal to formal. I think "we" can support informal learning by doing formal learning as best we can: open, socially engaged, Freirian, learning-centred.

David Delgado
a) Making it easy to find useful resources for anyone in the organization
b) Making it easy to make connections among people in the organization and sharing their knowledge
c) Encouraging everyone to learn what he needs or likes most in their job

Stan Stanier
I'm with Terry - first we need to identify the what, how and when

Frances Bell

by letting the learner determine the context and content of the learning and then offering support appropriate to that.

Stuart A Yeates
(a) avoidance of over-specified prescriptive assessments
(b) promotion of quality engaging resources

Paul Harrington

I agree with Mr Wassall the first part of the exercise will be to observe how it is happening amongst the 'digital natives' ( don't like the term) - then give them opportunities on our terms to use tech..

Terry Wassall

Good question! First we need to understand how informal learning takes place. Reflecting on and surfacing our own modes of informal learning would be a start, and there are probably many modes and contexts to consider. Then exploit this avoiding formality.

I/ve written before about the Reflective Evaluation project. It is a two year European Commission funded project, now drawing to a close, which aimed to produce ICT based resources for facilitating self evaluation activities by teachers. Pretty challenging, huh?

At the outset the project coordinators had the idea that this could be done with a tool developed in Powerpoint. The rest of the partners were not so sure. For many of us Powerpoint had little appeal, in terms of its scriptability and attactivess for users. The coordinators, Ira and Gerald form the University of Flensburg, were fortunately flexible and open to new ideas.

Jen, Chris and myself designed a web 2.0 (ish) tool, allowing teachers and trainers to access and answer multimedia questions designed to stimulate reflection, to see and compare with the answers of others and to create their own tools.

OK, it doesn/t go as far as I would like but there are real challenges getting people for five different countries to share meanings and ideas, and pedagogic limitations in the European Commission demand that the questions should be available in each partner language.

But the best bit of the project has been the multimedia. Despite most partners being traditional academic researchers, with limited computer experience, by this weeks workshop all of them were working together, sharing in creating videos and other multi media artifacts. Its creative and great fun.

Want to have a look? Better still, want to create your own learning materials. All you have to do is go to www.refelctive-evaluation.eu and create yourself an account.

NB We are still editing the help videos so you will have to learn as you go. But if you would like more information please get in touch. And before you ask, of course it is Open Source.

Ok - here is a question for those of you who are geographically challenged.Where is Villach. Well its in Carinthia of course. And Carinthia is In the eastern corner of Austria - near to Italy and Slovenia.

And Villach is the host to the annual conference on Interactive Computer Aided Learning.

Sandra Schaffert from Salzburg Research invited me to take part in a special session on Open Educational Resources and Practices. There were three other presenters, Victoria Hornung, also from Salzburg Institute who presented the excellent OLCOS project, Marcus Deimann from the FernUniveristat in Hagen, Germany presented a paper on integrating Open Educational Resources and Instructional Design and Marco Kalz from the Open University of the Netherlands gave a presentation on recommender systems for finding Open Resources. And I presented a paper by Raymond Elferink and myself on developing an Architecture of Participation.

We had planned a skype conference call to prepare the session but didn't get our act together. But despite this it worked well. the papers complimented each other. They all had something to say. that is not to say we all agreed. I am extremely dubious of the instructional design approach,. But as George Roberts says, one feature of communities of practice is homogeneous difference. I think that the session reflects the emergence of a community of practice around Open Educational Resources.

Anyway, if you want to find out more, here is a bumper package. The paper (click the link below). The presentation (click on the slide above). And a hastily edited audio of my talk.

Developing an Architecture of Participation

>Listen Now:

 Developing an Architecture of Participation - the talk [19:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Entry Filed under: General

Technorati Tags: Open content, Open source, OSS, oss_education