The Wales-Wide Web

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

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

Interesting article in the Guardian about a new guide by the UK Trade Union Congress on using social networks in work.

The guide points out that employers can legally ban the use of social networks and take action against employees who break such a ban. It also says that employers are entitled to consider social networking content if an employee has applied for promotion.

The General Secretary of the TUC appeals to employers to be reasonable pointing out employees should be able to have a life outside work. The guide goes on to give some sensible advice on the use of social networkls.

But it is this paragraph that I find most interesting:

"Work is a major part of our lives, and staff have always discussed aspects of their jobs in private. Now that online social networking is becoming mainstream, many of these private conversations are searchable by the public."

The use of social networking is redefining conventions around private and public discourses. Many of these conventions are implicit and tacit and of course are heavily culturally defined. In Germany people are much more 'private' than in Wales where we quite freely share information about our personal lives - and gossip happily about friends and acquaintances - with relative strangers.

It may well be that to move forward the debate we need to take what has previously been tacit and implicit and transform to explicit knowledge. Handbooks like the TUCs are part of this process.

Postscript: Just a short moan. News web sites like the Guardian are getting very lax about citations. Whereas once they always linked to original source material now they next to never do. I spent a good few minutes searching for the handbook. If news organisations are going to quote extensively form such a source I think they must provide a direct link. End of moan/

Technorati Tags: social software

I am underwelmed by mots of the Facebook plug-ins (although overwhelmed by the number available. And I totally fail to understand the attraction of applications like Zombies

But the one application which I think is really useful - as opposed to decorative - is my questions. I have tried asking questions a few times on my blog - and have got a reasonable response - but the blog display is in no way as useful as the plug-in for this sort of discourse. My questions is really handy for quickly gathering different people's views on key issues.

And - 9f you do have a Facebook account - my question is "How can we support informal earning?". For those of you without an account I will publish the relies on this blog some time in the future.

The UK telecommunication regulatory body, Ofcom, have just published their annual report.

It is a substantial body of work and I have to admit I haven't read it myself - relying rather on press and radio reports.

There seems to be much of interest in the report. For the first time women webusers have taken the lead in key age groups. At the same time an army of silver surfers has emerged and the over 65s are spending more hours online than any other age group, according to the Guardian.

Predicably young peopel are psending more time on line, with growing use of social networking istes. thsi time spent appears to be at teh expense of watching television.

Much of the BBC radio coverage was taken to the emergence of older people at heavier internet users than youth. Commentators speculated that this was due to the rise of internet commerce and to women using the web for social networking.

However, the preponderance of older users bares out the survey we carried out of the use of ICT for learning in Small and Medium Enterprises. We found older workers far more likely to use the web for learning than younger employees (albeit for informal learning rather than pursuing formal e-Learning courses). We speculated at the time this might be due to wider web access for more senior employees.

However, we felt, although could not proof, that older workers felt more at home using the internet for informal learning. Tomorrow I will have a look at the Ofcom report to see if it has anything to say about learning. But it remains my feeling that educational technologists have over-focused on developing learning applications and content for younger students and have failed to see the potential for extending and supporting lifelong learning and continuing professional development through the internet.

The term social networking also covers a multitude of activities. the radio reports tended to assume social networking as a leisure time activity - a replacement or chatting on the phone. Women do more of this than men, the reasoning went. I am unsure of this is true. But I would certainly suggest that much of the so called social networking is actually the use of social software for informal learning.

Back from holiday (I didn't look at a computer for a week!) and back to the blog. And what better start to the autumn season than this new report from the US National School Boards Association — a not-for-profit organization representing 95,000 school board members.

The study, funded by Microsoft, News Corporation, and Verizon, found the internet isn't as dangerous as people think, and teachers should let students use social networks at school.

Tech. Blorge.com say the report warns that many fears about the internet are just overblown. "School district leaders seem to believe that negative experiences with social networking are more common than students and parents report," the study reports. For example, more than half the districts think sharing personal information has been "a significant problem" in their schools — "yet only 3% of students say they've ever given out their email addresses, instant messaging screen names or other personal information to strangers."

This chimes with my long held belief that in a risk adverse society educational institutions spend far more time worrying about potential dangers and 'what if' scenarios than they do in helping students learn how to use the internet safely and creatively.

Here we go with another release from the Pontydysgu studios.

This one is a bit of an oddity its a mash up - based on an idea by Brian Kelly. Brian has invited participants in the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007 to submit lightweight examples of innovative uses of Web technologies which may be of interest to IWMW 2007 participants.

This could include, the Innovation Competition web site says:

• 'Mashups' which integrate content from multiple sources
• Informative, educational or entertaining use of multimedia (e.g. podcasts, YouTube videos, etc.)
• Informative, educational or entertaining use of 3-D virtual environments such as Second Life.
• Seamless access to content using technologies such as OpenID.

We went for the video mash up and my colleague Einion Dafydd mashed together my speech on PLEs at AltC last year together with the Jisc video on services oriented architecture.

I'm not quite sure what we have achieved - or even what we hoped to achieve. But it was a lot of fun. Anyway here are the reviews (all two of them!).

Brian Kelly says: "Not all of the entries to the IWMW 2007 Innovation Competition consist of mashups of text and images from various sources. Graham Attwell, a member of the JISC Emerge project team, has created a mashup of two video clips (the JISC cartoon about the E-Framework and a talk given by Graham at the ALT-C 2006 conference) which allows users to see the argument for approaches to development of e-learning services from two different viewpoints - that of institutional management as epitomized by JISC and the learners viewpoint as explained by Graham Attwell. This, I feel, provides an interesting example of scholarly debate which makes use of YouTube."

And Steven Downes comments "Nice video contraposing an official-sounding description of the e-Framework, a set of protocols intended to standardize educational web services, and commentary from a talk by Graham Attwell. I especially like the way he was able to dig up the subtext from what would otherwise seem to be an innocuous technical video."

You've read the reviews - now enjoy the video.

Students' trial by Facebook | Media | MediaGuardian.co.uk:

I haven't much time for rowdy, middle class, over-proveledged Oxford students. But I have even less time for the University internal police, archaically called proctors.

And now it looks as if the proctors are hacking Facebook to cause a bit of grief for the students.

But it is going to take some time before we sort out what can and should be shared through social networking sites and what rights of privacy - if any - we should be entitled too. And - I'm not paranoid, honestly - but if a few dozy Oxford proctors can hack their way through Facebook access controls, I sort of think that security services are not going to find it tricky. Are we all monitoring ourselves these days?

"Oxford University staff are logging on to Facebook and using evidence they find on student profiles to discipline students.

Photos on the social networking website of undergraduates celebrating the end of their exams have been emailed to students by the proctors, Oxford's disciplinary body, as evidence of breaches of the University's code of conduct.

Students now face fines of up to £100 after proctors collected evidence of students celebrating the end of exams by "trashing" their friends, covering them with champagne, confetti, flour, and even foodstuffs including raw meat and octopus."

Students may be unable to graduate until the disciplinary hearings are resolved.

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.

I am in Houston, Texas for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation 2007 Open Educational resources Grantees meeting.

Central to the event is a presentation by Daniel Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen Hammond, of their 

Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities.

It is a substantial report with many interesting asides and well worth a read.

They identify the following 'key enablers' as driving the OER movement:

• "open source code, open multimedia content and the community or institutional structures that produce or enable them;
• the growth of what we are calling participatory systems architecture; Our notion of architecture includes both technical and social dimensions.
• the continuing improvement in performance and access to the underlying information and communication technology (ICT);
• increasing availability and use of rich media, virtual environments, and gaming; and
• the emerging deeper basic insights into human learning (both individual and community) that can informed and validated by pilot projects and action-based research."

Central to the report is the call for the development of an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) (which is not a long way form what Ray Elferink and I have been advocating in the form of an Architecture of Participation. The authors "believe that the Hewlett Foundation can play a leadership role in weaving the threads of an expanded OER movement; the e-science movement; the e-humanities movement; new forms of participation around Web 2.0; social software; virtualization; and multimode, multimedia documents into a transformative open participatory learning infrastructure—the platform for a culture of learning."

They go on to say that "the proposed OPLI seeks to enable a decentralized learning environment that:  (1) permits distributed participatory learning; (2) provides incentives for participation (provisioning of open resources, creating specific learning environments, evaluation) at all levels; and (3) encourages cross-boundary and cross cultural learning." The OPLI can be envisaged as "a dream space for participatory learning that enables students anywhere to engage in experimenting, exploring, building, tinkering and reflecting in a way that makes learning by doing and productive inquiry a seamless process."

This is good stuff indeed - visionary but not beyond the realms of what can be achieved. Particularly welcome is the weving together of technical and social objectives. My only reservation is the continued stress on the role of higher education institutions - but maybe this is a reflection of the objectives of the Hewlett Foundation.

More tomorrow - I'll try and post a couple of live blogs from the conference. In the meantime I'm off to the Longneck Reception and the Good Company Barbecue Dinner.

I am much taken by a comment by Scott last week: "...we have entered an era of connected media. Connected media does not contain interaction; instead content items are nodes in a network of connections that are the focus of interaction. The content is inside-out. The hot content today is not interactive - Flickr/Photobucket, YouTube, iTunes, RSS feeds all feature non-interactive content, yet the content is highly connected via layers of interlinked metadata (del.icio.us, technorati, recommendations, hyperlinks, comments...)."

Of course he is right. And it is pretty easy to understand the implications in terms of how we work and learn and in how we develop e-learning content. It is less easy to work out how it effects how we report on our work. On the one hand our work will not be in one place - it will be scattered across different media and on different web sites. Last year we started looking at some of the implications of this in a seminar called 'How Dude, where's my Data'. NB I have finally got together a wiki documenting at least some of the outcomes of that seminar.

But students are still assessed largely on the outcome of their learning and in terms of their competence. Not - here are my connections - but here is something I have done and here is something I claim I can do. This is far less easy to document in terms of network nodes.

It may be that the e-Portfolios of the future will have to be based far more on process than merely outcomes - more here is something I claim I am competent to do and here is the interactions I have made which allows me to say this - rather than here is a thing I have made which allows me to claim I am competent.

I still feel that competence is a difficult concept pedagogically and am worried that educational technologists will see competence as a mere unproblematic taxonomy. This matters. If we are to develop and implement e-Portfolios - let alone Personal Learning environments - we have to get clear on these issues.

In the discussions I am having over e-Portfolios there is increasing agreement of the use of blogging type applications as a way of recording learning progress. There is also an awareness of the power of personal networks for peer feedback as an aid to reflection. BUT - and it is a big but - institutions and e-Portfolio providers still (naturally) want some way of representing achievement. How can we do this dynamically? Perhaps competence looks more like a tag cloud or a mind map than a 'skills journal'.

As part of my work for the the European Bazaar project I am  running a seminar entitled Social Software and Web 2.0: a challenge to the future of schooling. You can find details about the seminar and how you can take part below. But first here is the topic of the seminar.
 
'In a recent blog post Rita Kop says: “There is currently a vast array of communications options available on the Internet. Especially young people have grasped the potential offered to them by blogs, web pages and increasingly personal spaces such as 'My Space' and 'youtube' to make links with like minded people and to invite comments and messages to their postings. The speed in which communities are being formed has surprised most observers. Participants in these developments, though, take them for granted as expressing themselves to the wider world has increasingly become part of their life style.

The education world has not grasped yet the revolution that is taking place outside the class room. The discrepancy in the way technology is being used inside and outside the class room seems to be growing.

The availability of blog and web authoring tools and their ease of use have made that a vast number of people are now engaged in interacting on the Internet. It has created a huge leap forward in moving people on from being consumers to becoming producers of information.

As educators know, the pace of change within institutions is a lot slower than outside the brick walls, which raises questions about the ability of formal education institutions to keep engaged the generation that lives in a technology saturated world and has grown up with technology.”

At the same time researchers have begun to explore the idea of Personal Learning environments or PLEs. Rather than access a single learning application or a walled institutional learning area, the idea of a PLE is that learners can configure different services and tools to develop their own learning environment, bringing together informal learning from the home, the workplace as well as more formal provision by education institutions. The PLE is controlled by the learner and as well as offering an environment for accessing different information and knowledge allows access to web based publishing and other opportunities for creating content and expressing and exchanging ideas.

The idea behind the PLE is to harness the power and potential of social software and web 2.0 applications for learning.

As Graham Attwell has pointed out PLEs may be a seriously disruptive development, challenging the present model of schooling. The seminar is intended to examine the changing ways in which we are using technology for learning, to look at the potential of Personal Learning Environments and to discuss the implications for the future of our education systems.

This could include (but is not limited to) the following issues:

• Young people are increasingly using social networking sites and social software applications - but are they learning?
• What does the new uses of technology for learning imply for pedagogy and the future role of teachers
• What is the role of school in the future of more and more learning takes place over the internet
• How can technology supported informal learning be recognised
• How disruptive are the new technologies to the education system - is it just a bubble?
• How can Personal Learning Environments be reconciled with the social nature of learning?
• What are the implications of technology supported learning and PLEs for social equity within education?
• What sort of technological infrastructure should the education system be providing for learning?
• If content is increasingly created by teachers an learners and is open for access, how will we guarantee quality?
• Does increasing learner control and autonomy spell the end of centralised curricula?

and

• How dude, where’s my data?'

Click 'more' to find out how you can take part.

Bit of strange title, but this is my presentation to last weeks Ten Competence project conference in Manchester.

The conference itself was extremely interesting and I will be adding a couple of entries over various contributions in the next few days.

Meanwhile back to my presentation. I have talked before about how school is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the way people are learning in todays society. This extends beyond issues of pedagogy and includes both curriculum and the way we organise our education systems. In the paper and presentation characterise it as an "industrial model of schooling".

Whilst new approaches to learning using social software and seeking to recognise informal learning are welcome and necessary, I am sceptical that such model projects can be generalised within the present system. Indeed, the evidence of many, many innovative projects is that without project funding and special dispensation for innovation, they cannot be sustained beyond the lifetime of the project.

The answer is not 'better projects' but a thorough going reform of our education systems, indeed a new understanding of the role and process of learning in our societies. Above all we need to deschool society. OK, I know that this may be unpopular or unpalatable for most politicians. But someone, sooner or later, is going to have to address the issue.

In the meantime researchers have a key role, not just in pointing out that the schooling system is breaking down, but in developing radical, agile and pedagogically attractive models for learning within society and provoking a wider debate on the role of learning. Click on the image below to download a PDF version of the presentation - if you would like another format please get in touch.

Technorati Tags: e-learning, pedagogy, Peronal Learning Environments

I'm in Odense in Denmark for a conference organised by the Danish Universities Knowledge Lab on the future of digital technologies and learning. The title of my presentation is 'Learning Landscapes' - charting the move from the 'walled garden' of the institutional Virtual Learning Environment to Personal Learning Environments.

At the end of the presentation I will be taking participants for a quick spin around the ELGG application.

It's a long presentation - fifty minutes. I wrote it on the plane from Barcelona yesterday - sadly I don't have any photos on my new computer so have reverted to my old style of a lot of slides with (hopefully) not too many words on each slide (and white text on a black background.

You can download the presentation here in Powerpoint (3.1Mb) or PDF (black on white if you really do want to print it) - curiously also 3Mb.

odensedec06.ppt

Technorati Tags: Peronal Learning Environments, Personal_Learning_Environments

I've just arrived in Tallin for the first meeting of the EU funded b-Learning project. Don't know quite what to expect - I haven't worked with these partners before and in fact haven't even met them. according to the workplan I am responsible for the development and maintenance of a web based platform for the delivery of e-learning to five or six vocational schools. Of course I would like to go down the Personal Learning Environment route but I have the feeling that might be a step too far. More important than the platform is the pedagogic approach - I hope we can develop the use of e-Portfolios through the project. If they agree, then I will suggest we use a ELGG together with Moodle, if the project partners also require a VLE.

The last couple of days I have been in Oslo, where I co-facilaitated at a workshop on Social Software in education and, together with Misja Hoebe from Curverider, ran a hands-on session on the use of ELGG.

Interesting stuff. Had a good talk with Tore Hoel on the development fo e-learning in Norway. Summarising our discussion and probably getting a lot of it wrong - it seems that most institutions in Norway have well established uses of technology with tow Norwegian developed Learning management Systems dominating the market. The big issue as Tore explained is moving beyond the VLE, particularly in developing a more learner centred approach and implementing e-Portfolios. Here there is some debate over wether this can and should be done through extending the LMS functionality or adopting a more services based approach through integration of systems like ELGG.

The workshop itself was lively - despite me having a bad technology day - everything I touched seemed to break. What was impressive was the questions form participants - they seemed to home in n every issue including some I had not thought of.

As ever the issue of what responsibilities education institutions had for safety and security of students and data ware raised. I am firmly of the opinion that institutions do have a duty of care and that duty includes helping learners to manage their own data and understand how to use the internet in a safe and responsible way.

There was a very interesting exchange on what the teacher training institutions should be teaching trainee teachers. Whilst participants could see the pedagogic value of PLE type approaches using ELGG they were also of the opinion that whilst the majority of schools and institutions used VLEs or MLE type systems then they should also be using these systems in their programmes for training teachers. That's quite a hard issue.

Anyway = all in all I was encouraged. there is growing pressure for change and a growing debate over not just what technology should be deployed in the future but how education should be organised to take into account the changing uses of technology in (informal) learning and society.

I'm mirroring this post on http://cafe.teria.no/ - a Norwegian install of ELGG which we used during the presentation - if I have missed anything important (or got something wrong) please do add a comment.

Technorati Tags: e-learning, social software

I am still at the OECD meeting on Open Educational Resources.

There is a recurring discourse on quality. How do we 'measure' or represent quality. Many of the initiatives presented here are from higher education. Higher Education has a tradition of peer review and projects such as the Merlot repository are working to extend the peer review process to Open Resources.

In vocational education this would be a non starter. We do not have the resources, infrastructure or traditions and cultures for such a process to work. But even in Higher Education I am unsure such a process really can work. Who chooses the 'expert' reviewers? On what basis? What are the criteria for review?

More fundamentally the quality of materials depends to a considerable extent on the context of use. What is of high quality for me may not be for another user. Surely we need to find some way of representing users in any quality mechanism. That could be as simple as star rating systems. However, I think we need a more sophisticated mechanism which can capture the context of use as well as a quality rating - and ways of displaying such distributed metadata.

In other words - we need to build / adapt social social software for developing, sharing and re-purposing open educational resources. If you are interested in this work, please get in touch.

Technorati Tags: OER, open_content, social software

Great Bazaar seminar - 'Hey Dude, Where's my Data' in Barcelona yesterday. No time now to write a longer piece as I am at an OECD 'expert meeting' on Open Educational Resources (ironically invite only). I will try to write up my first thoughts at the weekend and of course will write a fuller account on the Bazaar project wiki. In the meantime you can read blog posts from the meeting by Ismael Pena Lopez on his ICTlogy blog.

Now live from the OECD meeting. Shigagawa Miyagawa from MIT talked about the MIT Open Courseware initiative as a social initiative to counter the "huge social cost if we let the dot coms take over'. He acknowledged the need to develop sustainability models. He talked about access and that in many African Universities despite poor internet access, there were excellent Local Area Networks. Therefore the is copying open courseware onto external hard drives for physical installation of university LANs.

Patrick McAndrew from the UK Open University presented the OpenLearn initiative, launched by the University yesterday. Looks extremely interesting, especially as through their OpenLab they are trying to make it easy for users to remix materials. We are going to hear a lot more about this in the future. Patrick presented OpenLearn as an experiment, saying the OU is not as brave as MIT. However he feels it impossible for the OU to reverse the direction they have taken, although he is still concerned at the costs of development.

The materials are available in XML and he feels the experience of this is of value to the university as a whole.

There is a continuing debate (which also came up at the Bazaar meeting) running over quality and whether universities should have a role in accrediting materials.

Patrick feels we are looking at futures - University 2.0 - and said there are many unknowns. We do even know if people learn using open content.

Technorati Tags: open_content, OER, social software

The Bazaar project, in which I am a partner, is organising a seminar next week on the theme of 'Hey, Dude, Where's my Data?'.

This text, taken form the introductory flyer explains some of the themes of the seminar.

"Seminar Theme: Hey Dude, Where’s My Data?"

With Web 2.0, more and more people have their documents, products, personal details and photos stashed all over the internet – what issues does this raise for education?

The rise of commercial services

With the use of free, commercial, centrally hosted, social software services growing in education, some important issues arise; Who controls this data? Do users care that commercial services are mining their usage patterns and selling this to marketing companies? Is the nature of these ‘free’ services understood – yes, users can come in and use the base system for free but often, in return, they are bombarded with advertising and their details/usage habits are sold. However, does anyone really care? Perhaps the convenience of service outweighs the perceived downsides."

We have asked the participants to prepare a short position paper. This is mine.

The issue of how data is stored, what is shared, who has access to it and who provides services is becoming an urgent question for education. That it has received little attention is probably a reflection of the limited understanding just what is going on by policy makers and educational managers. In some ways this is understandable. Firstly, the growth of distributed on-lien services is a recent phenomenon. Secondly, there is a digital divide in that it is younger generation who are making most use of these services.

The knee-jerk reaction of policy makers, where they have acted, is to ban such services. This is unfortunate and unsustainable. Banning access to such sites as YouTube and MySpace form schools and colleges will not make them go away. Indeed it could be seen as a dereliction of the so called ‘duty of care’ in failing to provide learners with the new and changing skills and knowledge of digital literacy.

What are the issues regarding distributed data and services?

1. Longevity.

Will it be there in the future? Internet companies come and go - especially at the moment. Services which are presently free may not be in the future. Even where services do continue it is easy to eradicate your own data. I was accessing my Google account on a new computer and was (stupidly) using a Spanish language interface. Instead of ticking to agree to the conditions, I clicked not to agree. Google instantly wiped my previously uploaded videos from their server. Of course I could upload them again but now they have new urls meaning all previous links are broken.

2. Security.

Other contributers to the Bazaar seminar have already said much on this so I will be brief. It is fairly obvious that service providers are struggling to provide secure services and ass the services grow it may be that security will be difficult to maintain.

3. Ethics.

Once more other contributers have pointed out the potential clash of ethics between education and learning and the shareholder / venture capitalist driven interest of many of the commercial service providers.

Of course it would be easy to say that the answer lies in only using locally installed services and blocking access for education institutions to the commercial services and social community sites. However the point and great attraction of many of these services is that they are social and community sites. Moreover it is through the user base and access to data form other users that they acquire their utility. Even blogging loses much of its attractions in a walled community.

What are the potential answers?

1. Some form of regulation or code of practice for service providers. The problem here is that the web has proved notoriously difficult to regulate. However it could be possible to provide some kind of kitemarking for approved sites if they adopt approved practices. This has happened to some extent with self policing by the internet chat providers. However, it is difficult to see how the regulation could be extended given the border free nature of the internet.
2. The provision of national services for education as a service infrastructure. But this would be expensive, large scale internet projects are prone to failure and it could become as much an infringement on privacy as privately provided services. National services may lack the agility of the present explosion in web 2.0 services.
3. The provision of services through more localized public infrastructure - for instance local education organisations or the public library infrastructure. This already exists to some extent and has some attractions - I will return to this idea further on in the position paper.
4. Learners taking more responsibility for their data through the provision of an extended portfolio or Personal Learning Environment. Learners would remain free to use external services accessed through their PLE. However important data would be held on local repository.

This is my preferred solution. The extent of the present problem suggests to me that we need to speed up the implementation of portfolios and PLEs. In some countries this is happening rapidly but in others it lags behind.

Of course it still begs the question of where data is held. I would suggest that all education institutions should install a lightweight standards compliant repository. Standards will, be important for allowing data to be transferred between different institutional providers. The systems should also allow users to download and store their own data - preferably on a potable memory device.

Also standards will be important for allowing federated search between institutions and allowing communities to be developed between different institutions and applications. Whilst the data storage is local if users wish, they should be capable of sharing that data outside institutional boundaries.

This still leaves open the question of provision for those not engaged in education. What happens when a student finishes at university, for example? Some universities are already proposing to continue providing services but to charge for them. I do not believe this is the right answer. There is a strong case for Adult Education providers to have a new role in providing an PLE / Portfolio service for all adults within their geographical area. This would obviously require funding but could be of immense benefit in stimulating lifelong learning.

Regardless of what answer is adopted, perhaps the most urgent issue to to extend the idea of digital literacy to include the issue of data. Learners will have to take more responsibility for their own data in future. We should be assisting them in judging what to disclose, to who, in what contexts and how to use services sensibly. That in turn require further professional development for teachers and trainers.

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Sorry not to have posted much lately. Up to my eyes in work and travel seems never ending.

Anyway, just to get the travel-log up to date. Spent most of last week in Romania - first in the beautiful; mountains of Transylvania and then in traffic clogged (but still beautiful) Bucharest.

I was in Romania for a meeting of the Reflective Evaluation project. We rolled out for the first time our as yet unnamed tool which allows an easy way for teachers and trainers to themselves create learning activities. This was always going to be interesting - given that the majority of the parters are teachers and trainers themselves rather than ICT experts. They seemed to like it. We benefitted from the input from Kris who has programmed the tool and is himself a specialist IT trainer. It was particularly good for me to watch how he presented the workshop. It requires a lot of patience in making sure everyone is keeping up and in guiding people through installing plug-ins etc.

The tool - about which I shall write more in the next month - is definitely a Web 2.0 development in that the activities of the learners or users form a key part of the learning materials. Of course this raises issues - particularly the relationship between expert and user based knowledge. This is quite a challenge for university researchers, used to the paradigm of expert knowledge drawn from research rather than practitioner knowledge based on practice.

What was particularly encouraging was that as participants became used to the idea of installing and 'playing' with the application, they became enthusiastic about other social software tools. By the end of the workshop everyone was sitting in the room sending messages to each other using Skype. Sometimes, working in the e-learning field, we can forget that many people have no knowledge of these tools and what use they might be for researchers and project development. We also forget that installing software - even modern, easy to use, web software, lays outside the experience of many users,

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