DJALCHEMI
An individual brew of learning, culture and technology

Fred Garnett on how to create new contexts for your own learning

I kept coming across Fred Garnett's name so often in my favourite online spaces that I began to believe we must have met some time ago, and I'd just forgotten it. As it turned out, when I introduced myself in June, Fred couldn't remember us having met either [Update: Seb Schmoller has reminded me that Fred and I were both participants in the email group for the Network Users' Forum a decade ago!]. Yet, as soon as we started chatting, we came across more and more areas where our interests coincided, from learners bootstrapping their own learning to innovations in the use of recording studios. In fact, Fred has explored where these two fields intersect — but more of that in a moment.

Following a range of teaching posts, from US universities to UK Further Education and Head of Community Programmes at Becta, Fred is now affiliated with the London Knowledge Lab. He's active in the informal Learner-Generated Contexts group. He's interested in how learners deal constructively with the unknown and how they reframe problems in an unpredictable world.

In some ways, Fred's work represents a more involved conceptual discourse around the themes in my interviews with and by David Gauntlett. So this interview will appeal if you want to dig deeper in those areas. Partly as a consequence of this, it is more dense in terms of terminology and concepts from educational theory. Hence a slightly longer preamble before we get to the interview proper.

What drew me to Fred's work was the focus on how learners can create the conditions to manage their own learning. This develops some of the themes in my interview by David Gauntlett, particularly around authority and power in learning. The challenge it represents to teacher-led learning is anathema in some quarters.

Elaborating on Agile Learning

I resist requests to pin down Agile Learning with a tight definition. I see it as a family of approaches, and when you've seen a few of these approaches perhaps you start to detect the family resemblances, and spot more distant relatives. Sure, the approaches share some things in common. The main thing, I think, is that they offer a response to the unprecedented circumstances we find ourselves in now, characterised by enormous richness of learning resources and tools, combined with harsh austerity in financial (and thus human) resources. I also happen to think that a degree of self-organising by learners is a promising path to take.

But this is an open and open-ended endeavour. It will evolve in unpredictable ways, which is why I think 'fixing' it in manifesto-style language. Yet, at the end of my interview with David Gauntlett, David asked if he could turn the tables and ask me a few questions. I left the tape rolling (actually an MP3 recorder) and recorded the impromptu discussion that followed. I confess that, in transcribing the recording, I have taken considerable liberties in rephrasing and elaborating what I said!

David Gauntlett: So why Agile Learning?

David Jennings: First there's a practical concern, that we've just gone through a period — starting with the dotcom boom but continuing only slightly abated since then — where a lot of money has been pumped into internet-based learning initiatives with Grand Designs. This has been based on growth projections, a few celebrated success stories like Google and Amazon, and large doses of faith and optimism. Although the small-pieces-loosely-joined ethos and Web 2.0 approaches have been with us for years, there's still been a tendency — especially in an era of an interventionist public sector, which I know well — to Think Big and vastly overestimate the profile and mindshare that top-down initiatives can attain.

David Gauntlett on "making is connecting" and the end of factory learning

The second in the series of Agile Learning interviews is with David Gauntlett, Professor of Media and Communications at University of Westminster. I first came across David at the time of his inaugural lecture, which, unfortunately, I missed because of a last-minute issue with my son (then just a few months old). Happily, I've been able to get to know David over the last year through our participation on the School of Everything Unplugged meetups in London.

A second reason to be cheerful is that David makes his ideas very accessible. This he does in at least two ways. First, his website and YouTube channel provide lots of ways to get a feeling for what he's about in 15 minutes or less. For example, here's a quick overview of his "Make and Connect" agenda and here's a slightly updated version of the lecture I missed.

David also makes his ideas accessible by expressing himself in very straightforward everyday terms, more or less jargon-free. This is a welcome and somewhat uncommon trait for an academic (especially one on the editorial board of a journal called Foucault Studies). But it's very much of a piece with the agenda that David is advancing, one that puts a lot of store in giving people the means to influence and remake the worlds they live in through creative engagement with their environment and each other. This echoes one of the influences he cites: Ivan Illich, whose books like Disabling Professions and Tools for Conviviality look towards a gently radical empowerment of citizens.

Dick Moore on Agile Learning, Agile Software Development and the Mobile Internet

Dick Moore was, until a week or two ago, Director of Technology at Ufi/learndirect — I've known him since his days at Doncaster and Sheffield Colleges, and then at a Santa Monica dotcom. We started talking about Agile Learning shortly after my last post about it, and I quickly felt there were enough interesting ideas in the conversation to make it worth developing and sharing. So I suggested doing an interview with Dick, and sent him a few questions to think about…

A few days ago, I received a comprehensive document with Dick's thoughtful replies. Hence what follows is as much a 'guest post' as an interview, though we did have a follow-up chat. Dick has a deep understanding of tech infrastructure and methods, so the first section is his take on the possible mappings between Agile Software Development and Agile Learning. The later sections weave together Dick's answers to my questions with some additional material from our chat.

Dick's blog is at ToolsAndTaxonomy.com and you can mail him at dmoore [at] MooreAnswers dot co dot uk. [Update, 15 July 2010: Dick has now posted his version of this interview, so have a look and check for comments there as well.

I'm interested in doing a series of interviews like this, with people who have different contexts for, and angles on, Agile Learning. If you'd like to be interviewed, please get in touch.

Agile Learning and Agile Software Development

What do we mean by Agile Learning? In software development, the 'agile' movement was as a reaction against large scale development projects governed by a monolithic organisational standard perceived to be overly bureaucratic, costly and slow for what is often small scale development. Not all development is suitable for such an approach in much the same way that not all learning and assessment could be considered suitable for an agile approach (though there may be elements within large learning programmes that might benefit from agile methods to better reflect real world situations).

Agile Learning: better results for less money

Create, adapt, remix your learning to meet your needs — and pay much less

That's the current tagline for an initiative we're soft launching, with the aim of bringing together people (you?) curious about self-organised learning in commerce, community and education.

How can you design and create your own learning experiences — or help your others to do so — and save money in the process? We don't have all the answers to that, but we know many learning initiatives of recent years have wasted a lot of money by being over-engineered and inflexible. We're interested in developing alternatives to this that are leaner, vastly more responsive to learner needs, and supported by more lightweight infrastructure.

Have online tools and resources got sufficiently sophisticated that, with a bit of ingenuity, you could create a social learning experience that delivers what you and your friends, colleagues or associates want?

We're placing a bet that in some circumstances they have, and you could. And we're calling this Agile Learning, because the approach is quick, responsive and keeps learners in control. It fits your timescale, learning preferences and outcomes you need, enabling you to change things as you go along, while sidestepping institutional inertia. It builds on some of the ideas that Seb Schmoller and I started writing about last year: see this post and this one. (Seb and I are the core of the 'we' in this post.)

We're not entirely sure how this Agile Learning group is going to work. The last thing we'd want to do is to over-specify it! We're anticipating some learning activities — online and offline — to pool experiences, resources, and generally accelerate our exploration of what makes this kind of approach work. But for now we're just floating the idea and inviting feedback from whoever's interested, in whatever format suits you.

You may be thinking that this seems a bit abstract… Help us choose where to provide or develop concrete examples. If you've got experience of agile techniques or tools, I'd love to do an interview with you, to be written up on this blog and/or elsewhere online. Or, if you share a specific learning context and problem, I'll have a go at outlining what an agile learning solution might look like.

If you can spare ten minutes, it would be immensely valuable if you could say a bit more about your particular interests by completing our survey.

And/or just contribute ideas directly via this forum.

We've just started an Agile Learning Twitter account and Facebook page. We'll run these in parallel for a while, and possibly add a wiki and/or social network platform, before deciding whether to keep multiple channels going or focus down. In the meantime, please retweet, become a fan, share with your friends, and so on.

In June I'll be convening some face-to-face meetings in London where we can review initial ideas and feedback and start self-organising the next phase of activity.

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University of Death by Sean McManus: A Review

There's a pivotal scene in University of Death where the muso-technology geek at the heart of the story struggles to persuade the venal record industry boss to buy-in to a groundbreaking new scheme that will change the industry forever. To accomplish this, the geek plays the boss a new composition, which has been engineered to embody the latter's favourite musical tropes — to push his buttons, if you will.

Without giving too much away, it works. The boss, called Clive in a knowing nod to a well-known industry mogul [Sean assures me no such nod was intended and any similarity to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental…], takes the bait and employs the geek to create more of these personalised sure-fire hits. Not just to create them, in fact, but to seed them virally through targeted online discussions.

I felt an uncanny doubling of the impact of this scene. The book touches on so many of the themes that interest me, and which I wrote about in Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll, that I began to wonder if a very clever geek had written it for the express purpose of pushing my buttons. It had, after all, reached me via a well-targeted email from a software bot claiming to be a writer called Sean McManus, who comes complete with a convincing back story.

Here's a couple of examples of how this canny piece of Artificial Intelligence works. It has taken my old blog post about listener behaviours and reframed it in part of the caustic portrait of record company cynicism: