A couple of months ago the UK think tank Demos published a consultation paper with the title Culture and Learning: Towards a New Agenda. The paper aims to challenge cultural professionals and educationalists "to provide a new and coherent direction for creative learning and for encouraging creativity through culture", and the consultation period runs until next Tuesday.
I find it a curious intervention, because in some ways it seems to be swimming against the tide. There is a strong emphasis on centralisation and standardisation, the favoured interventions of old-school bureaucrats.
Hat tip to Bridget McKenzie whose own response to this consultation brought it to my attention. And following her lead in making her response public, here is mine, organised according to the six issues that the paper encourages us to address.
Continue reading "Culture and Learning: response to consultation paper"I'm copying here something I've just added to the OpenRSA blog, relating to some work I'm doing in collaboration with Seb Schmoller:
I'm looking for examples of organisations (or looser affiliations of individuals) who are using social software for professional development. Does anyone have any suggestions that I could follow up?
By social software I mean social networks (e.g. Facebook, Ning), blogs, wikis, shared bookmarks etc. And professional development can mean many things, but I'm mostly interesting in enhancing intrinsic job-specific skills on the one hand and broader scouting of collaborative/entrepreneurial opportunities on the other. The organisations could be membership-based, employers, educators or just self-organising networks.
The selfish part of this is that it relates to some work I'm doing for the National College for School Leadership, who are interested in extending the way they use social software with their constituency of school leaders. I'm happy to feed back the lessons from any leads that anyone gives me and share them with readers of this blog. Look forward to hearing from you if you can recommend any suitable examples (with contact details if possible). Our immediate deadline is 18th January, but happy to continue the discussion beyond then…
Any suggestions welcome, either via comments here, or private communication.
Jane Hart, Head of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, is polling a number of online learning professionals and bloggers about their favourite tools for learning — from RSS feed aggregators to paper and pencil. Here's the list of Top Tens so far and here are my selections. The latter are a mix of old favourites (some of which may no longer be best-in-class, but in which I have too much time invested to make switching cost-effective) and a few recent discoveries that I'm still exploring.
Jane would welcome you submitting your own list, if you haven't already.
She's compiling the Top 100 tools by aggregating all the submissions. The value of this chart isn't at the top, which comprises common and mostly generic tools that you already know about (unless this is your first day online) and have probably already considered. The interesting stuff is lower down the chart, where you find more specialist and niche tools that may fill a need you have.
My frequent associate (and all-round good egg) Seb Schmoller has been polling views of e-learning practitioners on 'personalised learning', including what the term conjures up for you. He asked me for my thoughts. I wasn't sure I had any, but I find that, if I imagine myself in the role of a jaded old cynic (it's a challenge, but I rise to it), the opinions just come flooding out. So I posted them in the comments on Seb's blog entry.
Apart from mine, Seb's already got contributions from several leading lights in e-learning, and I think he's open to further input, if you feel so inclined. All comments will feed into a presentation Seb is making in a couple of weeks' time, and he will post the notes he collates from everyone on his site.
Today the BBC has one of those predictions for the coming year features, which includes some rather vague references to personalisation, such as "all the companies are talking reputation management and melding it with personalisation so when you get recommendations you can trust them," according to someone with a nice line in lime green cowboy hats. (Disclaimer: I'm just poking fun in a friendly way; please don't anyone take offence.) See also: The Guardian and the failed promise of personalisation.
In the course of writing my book, I started by describing blogs and wikis as two examples of the same thing — user-generated content. Towards the end of the book, I came up against the ways in which they are opposites: blogs reinforce individual voices, points of view and attitudes, while wikis efface this individuality and the accountability that comes with it.
Wikis have some advantages over blogs. Their design encourages users to aim for consensus, whereas the design of blogs encourages a kind of Tower-of-Babel cacophony. However, here I'm going to focus on one of the downsides of wikis. This is a philosophical piece that accompanies a more practical article over on my book blog.
Continue reading "Blogs, wikis, 'voice' and accountability"I checked the Alexa traffic ranking for this site last week, and it's down 60% in the last three months… I will be emerging properly from hibernation in a couple of weeks, and livening things up around here.
In the meantime, does anyone know what happened (or is happening) to Napster's Narchive (this link doesn't work for me at the moment, but it used to be the Narchive's address and I can't find one that does)? I mentioned it when it was launched six months ago, as "the people's music archive". I added some comments to one or two entries shortly thereafter, and I noticed the level of activity was low. For a month or more, now, I haven't been able to reach it at all. Have Napster quietly killed it?
Part of the reason I ask is because, I've just come across the Wiki Music Guide, which is in beta (isn't everyone?), and seems to be aiming to occupy a similar space, albeit with a format that's much closer to Wikipedia and also uses MediaWiki software. I added a brief profile of Philip Jeays. Right now, there are fewer than 250 artists on the guide, and those that are there vary between stubs and puff pieces that wouldn't qualify under Wikipedia's neutral-point-of-view criteria.
Continue reading "Just what the world needs: another music wiki"Just last week I was writing (for my book), "No one is going to set up a new free wiki-based online encyclopaedia any time soon: there can be only one." Now I'm considering whether I can edit that to say "No one is going to initiate from scratch a…" or should I just delete it altogether. This in the light of the news that Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is setting up the Citizendium project, which he describes as a "progressive or gradual fork" based on Wikipedia. The difference between this fork and the mothership? Experts have the final say over edits.
There has been some scepticism about Citizendium, but I think it's an interesting and healthy challenge to any dogma of hardline bottom-up evangelists. In the end, the opinions we experience are a mix of expert and amateur, qualified and ad-hoc. Why not try and build that mix into the ecosystem of an encyclopaedia system?
Continue reading "Wikipedia to bifurcate?"Last night I added my tuppence worth to Wikipedia's entry on the History of Virtual Learning Environments. As manager of an online learning consortium in the late nineties, I helped the software company Fretwell-Downing Education build a pilot web-based Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Though you would not know it from the entry as it stands at the time of writing, the description I've added of this case study — and the catalogue of others being collected in the Wikipedia entry — are not there just to add to the store of the world's knowledge: they are there to prove a point.
Last week the e-learning systems company Blackboard announced that it had been issued a patent (in the US) covering a number of software features that have been standard components of VLEs for several years. This quickly had several e-learning bloggers up in arms: I found out about it from Jay Cross and Seb Schmoller; and Stephen Downes has a good round-up as usual.
I share the widespread contempt for this development, and the disrepute that it brings on the ethos of patents. That's why I was more than happy to add my contribution to the Wikipedia entry to demonstrate the 'prior art', which could invalidate the patent by showing that the claimed invention was in public use prior to the date of the patent filing. Nevertheless I can't help feeling slightly uneasy about this politically and commercially motivated use of Wikipedia.
Continue reading "Knowledge, power and mobilising a lobby through Wikipedia"Learning Light is a not-for-profit organisation set up in Sheffield to "overcome the everyday obstacles our members face within the field of e-learning". It is supported from Yorkshire's regional funds but is open to more or less anyone.
I did some work for Learning Light last summer to build up their Knowledge Base, working with Seb Schmoller and David Kay (plus David's colleagues Liz Wallis and Camilla Umar). You can now register with Learning Light (free of charge), and thereby gain access to three reports, including one that I co-wrote.
Continue reading "Learning Light web site launches, research published"I start off questioning the value of blogging an event that you know in advance will be blogged to death from every side. Does it really help anyone to have multiple perspectives on one thing, when the inevitable inconsistencies between them may be confusing? And if there are six accounts already, what added value is there in a seventh?
And then the penny drops, and I realise how to answer my question: I'm not doing this just for your benefit, dear reader, I'm doing it for mine. It's a means of consolidating my reflections. I leave them on my doorstep, and if you pass by and find them interesting, so much the better. But I'm under no obligation. Did you think I was aiming to be 'customer-centred'? Pay me some money, become a customer, and I might be. Until then, if there's no value in this for you, well, you can have a refund. For blogs to have an authentic voice, people have to speak first as citizens, not try and fit what they say into customer/supplier roles.
All of which is a lengthy preamble to a few comments I wasn't expecting to make on yesterday's blog.ac.uk conference.
Continue reading "Blogging, learning, and going off at tangents"People have access to vastly more music, video and other entertainment than ten years ago. In the case of music, record companies are releasing twice as many new albums per year. Not only that, but some are 'rescuing' old and deleted tracks for release in the digital marketplace.
So how do people find out about all this material? How do they judge what they might like? I'm writing a book that addresses these questions. The title is Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll: Who knows what's next in media and music in the new era of digital discovery and the download culture (the lengthy subtitle may change). It will be published next year by Nicholas Brealey Publishing, UK publishers of John Battelle's The Search and many other titles on digital enterprise and learning.
Continue reading "Book announcement: Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll"On 2 June I'll be participating in the blog.ac.uk one-day conference on educational use of weblogs and weblogging software. It's in London at Living Space, and is free to attend. There's an embryonic web site for the event, which will develop over the next six weeks.
My involvement comes through a connection with Josie Fraser, who (along with Steve Warburton) is a fantastic catalyst for bringing together bloggers in the learning area. Register your interest in attending by emailing Josie via her posting about the event
A piece of work to which I completed my contribution almost two years ago has finally seen the light of day. The UK lifelong learner information profile (UKLeaP) has not been published as a British Standard, as originally expected, but as a 'Draft for Development'. I think this reflects some ongoing debates among different standards bodies and regimes, trying to bring their different perspectives into harmony.
I'm sorry things have been quiet here recently: I went cross-country skiing for the first time two weeks ago, and returned with the obligatory fracture (to my elbow), which was followed by a chest infection. I've got plenty of things to post, but am still recovering and catching up with things like VAT returns.
Here's another Web-2.0-style tool for aggregating information and links. It's the idea of Seth Godin, who has made his name from a series of books on innovative approaches to marketing in the age of the web. He sees this service, called Squidoo as a means for others to make their names in their areas of expertise — as captured in Squidoo's tagline, "a co-op of everyday experts".
I've created my own Squidoo 'lens', reviewed some other people's, and read Seth's free ebook about the concept behind squidoo. What follows are my reflections on these.
Continue reading "Publishing your perspective and expertise with Squidoo"What is E-learning 2.0? Well first of all it's a rhetorical manoeuvre by e-learning suppliers and consultants to distance themselves from the failures of the first wave of e-learning. Secondly it appears to be the bastard neologism offspring of e-learning and Web 2.0 technologies.
I only came across the term yesterday when I did some search-aided browsing to explore ideas for supporting informal learning with Web 2.0. The term doesn't have an entry in Wikipedia yet, which suggests that I'm not too far behind the pace, as surely someone will write one soon (after they've applied for the trademark).
In the spirit of what, no doubt, will be heralded by some as yet another 'new paradigm', I won't try and develop an argument about the topic or reach any conclusions; I'll just provide some links, some second-hand content and a bit of attitude. All you free-range learners can make some sense out of that, I'm sure.
Continue reading "E-learning 2.0, whatever that is"E-learning figurehead Elliott Masie is offering a wide range of podcasts in connection with the current Learning 2005 conference in Florida. In keeping with the reflexive tradition of the medium, this includes a podcast about podcasting…
The implementation of the podcasts is as professional as you'd expect: there's an option to play the audio with a Flash player (courtesy of Audioblog.com, as explained in the how-to-podcast feature), and there's a PDF transcript of all the audio.
Paradoxically, it's the availability of the transcript that draws attention to the limitations of the medium.
Continue reading "E-learning podcasts and the wonders of transcripts"The email exchange between Seb Schmoller and me continued after my last entry on games and learning, and we discovered we were writing at cross-purposes, as we had different ideas about what counts as a game. This is my attempt at some brief definitions of different kinds of play, and their relation to learning.
It started with a discussion about production values — does the idea of games in e-learning imply the same kind of expensive production values evidenced by the computer games industry? Seb wrote, "there are some circumstances in which low production values do not get in the way of a good game, with crosswords and sudoku being good examples of them". But I said these don't need high production values because they're not simulating anything outside themselves. And anyway, I'm not sure sudoku is a game; I think it's a puzzle.
Continue reading "Games, puzzles, simulations and role-plays"Like many people, I often accumulate knowledge by seizing on 'facts' that reinforce my intuitions and prejudices. So, given my feelings about use of games in e-learning, my radar jumped on the ESRC press release that says, "young people's experience of playing games (76% at least weekly in 2003) had a negative effect when they approached science simulations like a computer game and did not take them seriously" (via Seb Schmoller's mailings).
One way of reading this is that the attempt to sweeten the pill of learning with the sugar coating of a game fails to take account of young people's media habits and expectations. If you make it look like a sweet, it gets treated as a sweet: the sugar rots the kids' teeth, and they don't digest the pill! As Seb says (in a personal email), "You'd also need to know more about which learners reacted this way — level, ability; and how good the simulations were". Neither of us have been able to find the report which the press release describes, but my searching threw up a few interesting leads.
Continue reading "Games and learning design"As trailed previously, the CMALT (Certified Member of the Association for Learning Technology) accreditation scheme is being launched today at the Association's annual conference. This scheme is a portfolio-based means of recognising the experience and competence of professionals working in technology-based and technology-assisted learning.
Since we developed the scheme last year a second pilot has been run, and work has started on an e-commerce-enabled document workflow system for the submission and review of applications for CMALT status. The latter will come into use next year.
Somewhat inadvertently (and I hope this doesn't sound disingenuous, because I don't think it is), I became one of the first people to achieve CMALT status. As part of our work in developing proposals for the scheme I filled out an example application form, based on my experience. The intention behind this was as illustration and 'proof of concept'. I wasn't at the meeting where it was discussed, so I was surprised to hear later that not only had our proposal for the scheme been accepted by our clients at ALT, but also I had been accepted as a Certified Member. I've now updated my CV (115 KB pdf file) accordingly.
Wikis are great for supporting long-term or large-scale collaborative projects, enabling multiple team members to edit the same document, with the scope to view or 'roll back to' older versions. But for smaller projects the 'entry cost' of configuring them correctly and getting your material into wiki format, which is not standard HTML, can be a barrier to using them (I touched on this tangentially in last year's posting on building a wiki). Jotspot offers an alternative way in to building wikis, using MS Word-style WYSIWYG editing, and a straightforward way of importing content from standard file formats like Word and Excel. It also has a valuable set of applications that you can plug into your wiki to add functions, from project management and tracking to forums and polls.
As part of my work for the TUC, I used Jotspot to create an online version of guidance about managing TUC e-learning. This was initially produced and edited in Word, but, once we reached 'version 1.0', we wanted to have a means for the document to be shared by all potential users — meaning that they could update it in the light of experience, and everyone would always be able to find the latest version.
Continue reading "Jotspot wiki for e-learning guidance"It's almost exactly a year since I posted my review of BBC 6 Music as a learning resource on this site, and nearly eight months since I commented on the disappearance of some of the web resources from the 6 Music web site. Now 6 Music has begun a weekly podcast of speech highlights from its programmes as part of the BBC's download trial, so it seems a good time to review what's changed.
Continue reading "BBC 6 Music podcasts and learning"I've finally finished the rigorous evaluation report of Learning Activity Management Systems (LAMS). Seb Schmoller has an overview of the report and commentary on the small number of actual LAMS implementation cases.
One strand of the report jumped out at me. It observes that "it is less easy to adapt [a] lesson 'on the fly' in LAMS than in a traditional teacher-facilitated session," and that "some [students] were frustrated by the inflexibility of a LAMS sequence". Elsewhere the report refers to the linearity of LAMS sequences as restrictive and less than satisfactory.
What this suggests to me is that LAMS — in common, it must be said, with most e-learning approaches — reinforces the separation between the planning of a learning experience and its execution. This separation reduces the scope to be sensitive to the interactions with (and between), and to adjust and improvise accordingly.
Continue reading "Evaluation of Learning Activity Management Systems"Doug Brent has written an interesting paper in last month's First Monday on how historical trends are being played out in online education. He draws a distinction between "knowledge [or, more strictly, teaching] as performance and knowledge as thing" (emphasis in the original). Loosely speaking you could map this onto my process-versus-product distinction in e-learning.
What Brent adds to this simple opposition is an explanation of the trend towards the thing/product end of the spectrum. He follows the work of Shoshana Zuboff in seeing it as an example of the increasing recording or 'textualisation' of work, which can be traced back at least to the Scientific Management school of the early twentieth century. In this trend, work is increasingly written down in manuals and procedures, or embodied in ICT systems, so that there is less reliance on the more oral traditions of apprenticeship and learning by interacting.
Continue reading "Teaching as performance"I met Graham Stewart a few months ago in connection with some online social networking developments. Graham's very active in building, and experimenting with, social software. His latest endeavour (with Neil McEvoy) is the Bootstrap Network, a "self-organising community of Internet entrepreneurs seeking to collaborate and create new business ventures". (For geeks, the Bootstrap Network, like Ecademy, is written in Drupal.)
Graham recorded an interview with me, posted in his Bootstrap Network blog, which covers some thoughts on online learning, and on music-related learning resources with particular reference to podcasting. The interview was done over the phone, so please excuse some of the awkward pauses and less-than-articulate mumblings.
One news service to which I subscribe described the backstage.bbc.co.uk beta as "the talked-about BBC content archive", which confuses it with the pilot of the Creative Archive, which it isn't. But it's easy to see how this confusion arises. The backstage site headline (at the time of writing) is "Build what you want using BBC content", which is pretty close to one of the stated purposes of the Creative Archive.
backstage.bbc.co.uk is targeted more at techies than at 'creative media' producers — a distinction that is becoming increasingly blurred. The content that it offers is not programmes but a collection of RSS feeds and APIs (RSS definition, API definition). A software development kit is also promised in the near future. This content and data isn't licensed under the Creative Archive Licence but under some terms of use that have a remarkably similar gist to the CA Licence.
Continue reading "BBC geek archive (sort of)"Seb Schmoller's fortnightly mailing provides the latest news on Learning Activity Management Systems (LAMS), which I touched on last year. The LAMS concept, developed in Australia, now has a web site, from where you view a four-minute Flash demonstration of LAMS in action and download the open source LAMS software. Seb has more details on the background and the UK trial of LAMS. [Update 27 May 02005: the LAMS evaluation report has now been published.]
The LAMS concept depends for its 'pay-off' on teachers developing sequences of learning activities, and then sharing them and/or re-using them themselves. This is effectively a programming task, even if the programming environment is heavily visual, to make it easy to use. And research shows that this kind of 'end-user computing' is bound up with many social, organisational and task-specific influences — because end-users are not drilled in the systems analysis and design disciplines that allow software engineers to abstract from real-world requirements to modules of code. People like Bonnie Nardi have done extensive and insightful research on the social ecology of users participating in the design and re-use of everything from spreadsheets to intelligent agents. It would be interesting to see that kind of research applied to the use of LAMS by teachers.
Another Seb Schmoller/David Jennings co-production hits the streets as you can now get E-learning in the workplace: a union negotiation and implementation guide, which the two of us researched and wrote, from this page on the TUC web site. It's a free PDF download, or alternatively, since it's a large full-colour file, you can request a printed copy (also free) by email. I said this would be published by the end of last year — so, only three months late… (it took longer than expected getting organisational clearance for all the quotes, and then the design work had to be done).
The guide is aimed mainly at union negotiators, and others in the trade union movement who have a stake in work-based learning. It provides information and advice to help them represent union members' interests during consultations or negotiations with employers about the introduction of e-learning at work by the employer.
The seminar on 'Supporting e-learners', at which Seb Schmoller and I were due to present, didn't happen in January and we've been told recently that it's postponed indefinitely. We had already prepared a eight-page handout for our presentation [PDF, 156KB], which we've been given permission to publish.
Continue reading "Implementing the BS 8426 British Standard for supporting online learners"Chris Dede has an interesting article in a recent issue of EDUCAUSE on how new generations are approaching learning in new ways as they take for granted web, email, instant messaging and mobile communications, distributed knowledge and associational webs of representations. He uses the term 'neomillennial learning styles' though he is not using 'learning styles' in quite the traditional sense or that attributed to theorist David Kolb.
Many people have written about the changes to teaching, tutoring and mentoring styles that e-learning brings into play. These can be summed up by saying that tutors are no longer positioned as the founts and guardians of knowledge, and become conduits for knowledge from multiple sources, or facilitators of learners constructing their own understandings. (And, yes, before anyone says anything, I know that this shift was already under way in learning theory for a decade or two before e-learning took off.)
The learning styles that Dede suggests, based on his (non-empirical) review, do not break ranks with this, but show the other side of the coin.
Continue reading "New learning styles for digital environments"Failures are interesting. It's often said that we would learn more if we spoke more about our failures. But no-one really wants to look bad in public so they just publish their 'little' failures. Like this one, which didn't crash and burn, it wasn't aborted, or even stillborn, because it never got 'fertilised' and never got off the ground.
In 02003 I attended two courses on the SuperCollider environment and programming language for real-time audio synthesis. Despite the best efforts of my teachers, Nick Collins, Fredrik Olofsson and Fabrice Mogini, I never got the hang of it. And I was in good company: other musicians on the courses — people I've paid to see perform — either dropped out or said months later that they were still struggling to get a purchase on how to apply SuperCollider in their work. In my case, the lack of both programming background and any grasp of music/synthesis theory, combined with poor discipline in working on SuperCollider outside of the course sessions, did for me pretty comprehensively.
But that's not the failure I was going to write about.
Continue reading "E-learning for music technology"Sometimes I miss the most obvious things to record here. For example, the one-day course Supporting Learning Relationships Online that I devised and deliver with Julia Duggleby, author of How to be an Online Tutor (among many other roles). The course is marketed and sold through the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
Continue reading "Course in Supporting Learning Relationships Online"My posting yesterday turned into a bit of a rant in places, particularly on the subject of educational games. Today's is part spill-over of that rant, and part explanation of it.
Leaving aside the disingenuous and diffident aspects of smuggling learning under the cloak of 'fun', what I really want to say is that e-learning should leave space for learners (and, where applicable, their tutors) to re-negotiate the learning process as it unfolds. Learning providers should accept the degree to which this entails some loss of control.
The prevailing model in the market for e-learning is to design it as a product rather than a process. What do I mean by this? I mean that the interaction through which people learn is coded into the bits and bytes of the learning material, rather than being formulated as more open-ended activities that allow learners and tutors to improvise and make up their own interactions. E-learning in the guise of games is one example; e-learning that aims to emulate the production values of television is another, following the Video Arts example — as though adding 'celebrity sauce', by hiring a famous face to shoot a sketch or two, makes the learning more enticing and effective.
Continue reading "What's wrong with e-learning: product and process"In the US, the New Media Consortium and the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative have published a 23-page report on new developments in technology that they predict will have an impact on "teaching, learning or creative expression". You can download the full report for free via Raimond Reichert's review in elearning reviews.
The review itself is an excellent summary and makes some telling points. I'm very sceptical about the faddism of some of the selections.
Continue reading "Adoption of games and wireless technologies for e-learning"I'm surprised there aren't more sets of links to e-learning resources in the museums, libraries and archives sector. Perhaps the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council is in the process of addressing this as part of their recent mapping of e-learning.
The best I've found is the E-Learning Knowledge Base, by MacKenzie Ward Research and curated by Nadia Arbach (now E-learning Curator at the Tate) — with thanks to Seb Schmoller for this link. Launched in 2002, the site is still updated, but I suspect it has not fully kept pace with developments. A wiki site, or even some moderated web links facility, would make it easier for others to contribute to the updating, and more likely that they would.
When it's updated, the web site for the elearning group for museums and galleries, libraries and archives will be a useful way of keeping in touch with the latest thinking and events. The eLearning Centre's General Interest Showcase also includes a number of examples from libraries, museums and galleries.
The fruits of the project I worked on last year on accrediting e-learning practitioners are starting to see the light of day. If you go now to the home page of the Association for Learning Technology you can sign up to receive occasional progress reports, as well as downloading this background to the planned scheme (156 KB PDF).
CMALT stands for Certified Member of the Association for Learning Technology, and the scheme involves providing a portfolio with evidence of experience and achievement in four 'core' areas of e-learning and learning technology and at least one specialist area (as well as a membership fee). These areas are listed in the background document referenced above.
The CMALT scheme will be launched fully later in the year once a web-based system has been developed for portfolio creation, assessment and maintenance.
