Learning as Social Participation

You may already be aware that I’m working in a small advisory group, looking at Social Media for the LSIS Excellence Gateway.

Some of my initial thoughts are related to:

• Social Networks/Media being viewed as ‘non-educational’ domains. – This is a view point that I frequently come across in the Schools & F.E. sectors.  I wonder if perhaps, people emphasize ‘social’ as non-constructive and non-educational?

• Access to information/data sharing with or without a user account. – I’m thinking here back to the initial arguments for and against such things as Google Scholar.  Open data repositories.

• Participation in a Community of Practice (CoP) as a ‘guest’ – how/or should information be streamed and filtered to the user without the requirement to sign-up?

 

So, I spent my lunch-time knocking up this brief survey/questionnaire.  It is not an LSIS survey – it is purely for me to gauge current perceptions of existing CoPs.

Thanks for your interest and assistance.

afterglow

You know that sinking feeling you get?

The one right after a big event is over?

The feeling of emptiness and reflection?

Well, that’s essentially how I’m feeling right now.  BECTA TEN & MoLeNET have both been and gone (I’m sure I’ve written about this before) and there is unlikely to be anything similar on the horizon for a while, due to cutbacks in education and more specifically, educational research.

Yes, I’m putting the same amount of energy and enthusiasm into our work within the department and college.

But…

And this is the but – what we do here will only make a difference to our own learners and perhaps a few other groups of people who use our systems and facilities.  What about the learners in schools and colleges where they are not so lucky (and I use the word ‘lucky’, deliberately) to have had large-scale funded technology projects?  Or where there is no positive dialogue going on between learners, tutors and technical staff?  Or where there is no real emphasis being put on the benefits of technology in teaching & learning?

It might sound a little odd – but I do genuinely worry about learners NOT getting access to technology or NOT having equality of opportunity due to a lack of funding, staff motivation or institutional policy.  It’s not fair and it shouldn’t be happening in the UK in the 21st Century.  Why do I care?  Well, there are a number of reasons… chiefly, I feel that the education system let me down quite a bit – because we didn’t have equality of opportunity at the schools I attended.  Yes, things have improved since then, but in all reality – 25 years on, there still appears to be a lack of an effective and cohesive, education policy (and practice) in this country.

We’re now faced with a period of ‘austerity’ across all public sectors.  Well, this will have a knock-on effect in years to come.  There will be learners in schools, colleges and universities now, who will not be able to get a job or have the relevant skills and qualifications for the jobs that will be available to them in the future.  This is essentially what happened to us in the 1980′s and it created whole generations of unemployed and unemployable people.  We still feel some of the fall-out now.

Education & Technology projects are key to embedding effective practice for the future generations of teachers and learners – what we do now, will affect the future state of education.

So, what should really be a feeling of warm afterglow, is more likely to be the cold dying embers of sustainable technological development…

by mynameisharsha

MoLeNET Conference 2010

QEII Conference Centre

Sleeping has never been one of my favourite pastimes…  I know that our bodies and brains are supposed to rest in order to rejuvenate but I’ve always found sleeping to be such a waste of time and a bit of a chore.

So, having gone to bed at around 1am – I was up again at 4am to get ready for the MoLeNET Conference & Awards, which this year was held at the QEII Conference Centre in London.  The taxi was on time and so was the train (5:25am)

2 hours 10 minutes passed by so slowly, especially stopping at such delightful provincial towns as Runcorn, Stafford, Crewe and Milton Keynes… but fear not  I arrived in London 3 coffees later and after some deliberation took the tube to Westminster.

The MoLeNET conference had a definite tinge of sadness about it this year – I guess due to the lack of funding of worthwhile research by the current government.  However, we made the best of a depressing situation and put on a decent display of mobile learning practice and pedagogy.  It’s great to see how people are tackling what are fundamentally the same issues in so many different ways.

MoLeNET 2010_1

I was privileged to have addressed the conference by giving an insight the the thin.clusion project and had a conference stand (in the corner – was that deliberate?)  I must admit, I wasn’t really prepared to speak to the entire conference – I thought it was going to be a small session…

I’m really proud to have had so many people interested in the project and I’ve now been approached by a few different JISC representatives, to do Case Studies about LODs.

So, the whole conference went well – it was very different to the conferences I’d been to before as a delegate… it’s a shame, because I was on my own, that I didn’t get time to go and look at other stands and chat to anyone away from my stand.

I came away knowing that the 19 hour round-trip had been worth it, even though the

weather had been cruel (I was soaked through trudging around London) – there’s a lot to be said about paying £70 more to get home early, rather than waiting for the first off-peak train at 19:05.

Oh, the joys of Nuneaton station in the dark autumn rain…

Anyway  – I got home, sat down – reflected on the day and couldn’t really believe it was a year ago that we’d gone down to the LSN to pitch or project…

Check out my conference photos

or my audio blog – Setting up for MoLeNET Conference

thin.clusion

Confession

Forgive me father, I have sinned – it’s been two months since my last blog entry.

So, what’s been going on then?

Well, BECTA Technology Exemplar Network is finished, MoLeNET has also finished and we’ve completed our college enrollment.  BECTA TEN was enjoyable, I made some new contacts (as well as renewing old ones) I got to learn about life in the WBL (work based learning) sector and found out about some amazing work with the homeless & refugee community on the south coast.

MoLeNET was a great experience and our project generally went well.  The technology element was outstanding and I pay public tribute to Martyn Coleman and John Paul Szkudlapski for their technical wizardry and commitment to ensure the technical aspects of the project were flawless! Thank you guys

I think if there’s one thing I’ve learned from working on projects, it’s that with the best will in the world – personnel will let you down far more often than technology will.  That said – I loved working on the project and would get involved in more, if the opportunities arise.

Back at college – it was another hectic summer of upgrades and installations, which (if you’re interested) you can start to read about on our new departmental WordPress site.

The MindMug Midnight-hour

New post coming up at Midnight (BST) tonight

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vinish/581160509/

mobile learning: people and technology

Just an explanatory note about this blog entry:

I was working on this just before Easter and totally forgot to update it – I still have a lot more to write-up (but this can be a blog in progress).  Basically – I was reading from two books – which are listed at the foot as further reading… I’ve picked out a few areas that I want to expand on at some point… I thought I should really make this entry live, in order to embarrass myself into finishing it.  I think the problem was – I had no reason, other than my own idle curiosity, to write this up and subsequently it got forgotten about over the Easter break.

I’m working on the general premise that ‘people’ are the mobile element in Mobile Learning, not the technology.

A theory of mobile learning

…According to the National Research Council (1999), effective learning appears to follow a social-constructivist approach – learners in the active process of building knowledge and skills via practice within a community: (p.223)

• Learner-centred – Builds on skills & knowledge of students, allowing them to reason from their own experience.
• Knowledge-centred – Curriculum based on sound validated knowledge, taught efficiently with inventive use of concepts and methods.
• Assessment-centred – Assessment matched to the ability of the learner, offering guidance that builds success.
• Community-centred – Successful learners from a mutually promotive community, sharing knowledge and supporting less able students.

With convergence of education and the ubiquitous use of personal and shared technologies – …A theory of mobile learning could be tested against the following criteria: (p.225)

• Is it significantly different from current theories of classroom, workplace or lifelong learning?
• Does it account for the mobility of learners?
• Does it cover both formal and informal learning?
• Does it theorize learning as a constructive and social process?
• Does it analyze learning as a personal and situated activity mediated by technology?

The authors offer a tentative definition of learning within this context, “the process of coming to know through conversations across multiple contexts among people and personal interactive technologies” – here the focus is NOT on the learner, NOR their technology, but the communicative interaction between these to advance knowing.

Vavoula (2005) states that 52% of everyday learning episodes involve one or more pieces of electronic technology.

Extracts from:

1. Sharples, M., Taylor, J. and Vavoula, G. ‘A Theory of Learning for the Mobile Age’, in Andrews, R. and Haythornthwaite, C. (eds.) (2007). The SAGE Handbook of E-learning Research. Sage Publications Ltd.

Further reading:

1. Andrews, R. and Haythornthwaite, C. (eds.) (2007). The SAGE Handbook of E-learning Research. Sage Publications Ltd.
2. Conole, G. and Oliver, M. eds. (2007). Contemporary perspectives in e-learning research: themes, methods and impact on practice. The Open and Flexible Learning Series. London, UK: Routledge.
3. Laurillard (2002) Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective use of Learning Technologies, (2nd Edn). Abingdon: RoutledgeFalmer.

in the still of the nite

During the past couple of weeks I’ve been drawn toward research work in the (still) relatively new field of mobile learning; looking at work by Laurillard (2002); Vavoula (2005); Sharples, Taylor and Vavoula, (2007); Conole and Oliver (2007).

I’m interested in the concept of mobile learning in terms of the ‘learner’ being the mobile element of learning, rather than the technology – where the focus is on the mobile capabilities of the device.  Recently, I’ve heard conference presentations and papers tending toward a far more learner centered education model – so where does this leave the educator and the technology within the realm of mobile learning?

I intend to look deeper into this in another blog entry which might take me a few more days to publish – however, in the mean time, I’m sure I’ll receive plenty of really interesting comments from people who have already worked through this.

reasons to be cheerful, part III

This is a follow-on from my post about the BECTA ‘Time to Innovate’ Conference 2010.

Reasons to be cheerful, part I

OK, I’ve slept on it – perhaps I came to the conference full of optimism due to the success and scale of the 2009 BECTA conference?  Perhaps I was interpreting ‘time to innovate’ as a call to arms – “be innovative with learning technology”!  Perhaps I was feeling good because we’ve been part of BECTA TEN Phase 1 & 2 and we have a MoLeNET Phase 3 project, and also had good case studies written about our effective practice with technology.

Reason to be cheerful? I know that we’re on the right tracks and are committed to utilizing learning technologies for all the right reasons.  I’m lucky that I’m allowed space, time & funding to be innovative in my job role.

Reasons to be cheerful, part II

It was interesting that James Clay posed a question to the conference Q&A panel, on the lines of – ‘How can we innovate, learn and progress, if funding streams, statistics and OFSTED, etc. penalize innovation?’ correct me, if I totally misrepresented that, James There were also some good Tweets within the conference stream which were still questioning and challenging, rather than just (virtually) nodding along with what the speakers had to say.

Reason to be cheerful? People are still prepared to be innovative and challenge the conventional.  I’ve always worked to a personal maxim: “If I don’t innovate, I stagnate”.

Reasons to be cheerful, part III

I’m back at my desk, facing some new challenges… the coming financial year will be tight (we all know that), changes at the LSC mean we go back under Local Authority control from April 1st -  I’m not yet sure what that will mean for us.

Reason to be cheerful? I have a great job, have wonderful staff, am involved in some amazing projects  – and possibly most importantly… I am part of a fantastic extended community of practice stretching around the globe – fellow practitioners and educators who are prepared to be innovative, share what they are doing and encourage others to do the same.

If you’re happy and you know it – clap your hands

Shibboleth Implementation at BSFC

BECTA TEN Profile

MoLeNET thin.clusion

the future is bright, the future is augmented

[Vimeo=http://vimeo.com/8569187]

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

There are a couple of threads about ‘the future of the web’ & ‘mavericks/innovators’ on the ‘BECTA Technology Exemplar Network’ Ning – which unfortunately for those outside the project, is a closed Ning group.

James Clay posted up this incredible video of the potential future for augmented reality in the home. Is this the kind of future you want? How should technology interact within your own personal space?

I am a MoLe

Back from two REALLY intense days of MoLeNET research training in Manchester (the hotel coffee was awful).  As ‘Lead Practitioner Researcher’ for our thin.clusion MoLeNET project, I am responsible for the research programme in the project;

Leading research activities – assisting colleagues to plan and conduct research relating to investigating mobile learning in the project – organise training sessions for the project staff – assist the LSN with specific data collection – Help colleagues to present the data collected, findings, analysis and synthesis of the findings of the research – write and submit the interim and final project research reports… etc.

Oh – and I have a demanding day job too!

I’ve written a little entry on our project blog