Category Archives: G8WAY

An update on the PLE2011 conference

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I am extremely busy today but time for a quick catch up on the Personal Learning Environments Conference 2011, being held from July 11- 13 in Southampton UK.

Last years conference in Barcelona attracted nearly 90 submissions, far in excess of what we expected. This year we had less, with 65 papers, symposia and workshops. I don’t think the lesser number was due to reduced interest, but rather that in the present economic climate, many researchers are finding it hard to gain funding for conferences (I will write a further blog on how we can deal with this). I suspect also that beautiful though Southampton may be, it does not match Barcelona in terms of conference pulling power! We have just finished the review procedure with all the attendant difficulties of establishing shared criteria and quality standards for reviews and persuading overworked colleagues tos pare the time for an unpaid for activity.

Out of the 65 submissions we have rejected two for not meeting the submission guidelines. A further four are ‘borderline’ and we are further reviewing those proposals. Happily the rest are considered good enough fro acceptance.

The good news – in general the standard of submissions is much higher this year than last year. I suspect there are two main reasons for this – firstly an improved common understanding in our communities around the idea of Personal Learning Environments. Last year we had problems in that in many proposals it was hard to relate the focus of the paper to the idea of PLEs – this year that relationship is much clearer. The second reason is that we extended the length of abstracts this year and that seems to have improved the quality.

But I still get the feeling that a number of submissions do not do justice to the ideas and research on which they are based. I do not find it easy writing proposal abstracts and wonder if there is some mileage in firstly a little collective thinking in what we are looking for in a proposal and how we can convey that to potential contributors and secondly a more inclusive and supporting procedure to help those – especially ‘emerging’ researchers in writing quality proposals. Any ideas welcome.

Innovation, education and thinking outside the skills matching box

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The second verse of the great Pete Seeger song ‘Little Boxes‘, written by Malvina Reynolds goes:

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And of course it is true. More than that, it is the policy on which most of our careers guidance practice is based. Find what skills industry and commerce needs, goes the policy, set up training places to meet those needs, put people into those boxes and we will turn out a neat match between skills and the needs of the economy.The strategy is called ‘skills matching’ and forms the basis for the European New Skills, New Jobs policy as well as that of many national governments.

Universities traditionally stood aloof from such a policy which they saw only as applicable to those in vocational education and training. Univeristy was about the development fo minds and about research.

But with the increasing commodification of universities, they too are embracing such a strategy, in the name of value for money and employability. Students are reluctant to part with large sums of money unless they can see a job progression route for their expenditure on a degree course; governments regard vocational relevance as the key criteria in providing fiances for higher education.

The only problem is that the ‘Little Boxes’ approach doesn’t work. Firstly employers often don’t know what skills they want. take the fiasco at the end of the last century when the European Industry Group for Information and Communication Technologies was predicting huge skills gaps in computing and computer programming. These gaps never materialized despite little growth in the supply to computer programmers. Secondly we simply do not have sufficiently well developed central planning infrastructures to plan for skills and employment in such a way.

This is not to deny the needs for close community links between employers and education providers, at least on a local level. However this should not be to the detriment of other community interests in education and community well being. And rather than focus on skills matching, it would be far better to focus attention on creativity and innovation. If we look at regional innovation centres in Europe such as the manufacturing clusters in Emilia Romana or the media cluster in Cardiff it could be argued that such growth happened due to innovation around the skills and creativity of the workforce, rather than because of matching of skills to existing industry (indeed in Cardiff’s case the economy was traditionally based on heavy industry and manufacturing).

In any case is it possible to ‘predict’ the skills needed int he economy in a period of fast technological change? The Institut Technik und Bildung at Bremen University, with whom I have worked for many years used to talk of the ‘shaping’ principle. They saw education as playing a key role in shaping work organisation and skills development as enabling social innovation in production and economic development. The word ‘shaping’ is a translation of the German ‘Gestaltung’, also commonly translated as ‘design’. And once more this would suggest we can design our futures, that technology and production are not mechanistically determined but rather can be shaped or changed.

But for such an approach we need people who can think out of the box, who can consider the social implications of technology development. And that will not happen through a skills matching policy!

Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School

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I was talking with Cristina Costa this morning about some of our ideas for the Radioactive project (more to come on this soon) and she asked me if I have read anything by Myles Horton. To my regret I have not and intend to remedy that later this week. In the meantime here is a short video about Myles Horton and his work and an excerpt from Wikipedia:

“A poor white man from Savannah in West Tennessee, Horton’s social and political views were strongly influenced by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, under whom he studied at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Along with educator Don West and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski of New Orleans, Horton founded the Highlander Folk School (now Highlander Research and Education Center) in his native Tennessee in 1932. He remained its director until 1973, traveling with it to reorganize in Knoxville after the state shut it down in 1961.

Horton and West had both traveled to Denmark to study its folk schools, centers for adult education and community empowerment. The resulting school in Monteagle, Tennessee was based on a concept originating in Denmark: “that an oppressed people collectively hold strategies for liberation that are lost to its individuals . . . The Highlander School had been a haven for the South’s handful of functional radicals during the thirties and the essential alma mater for the leaders of the CIO‘s fledgling southern organizing drives.” (McWhorter) The school was created to educate and empower adults for social change.

In their 1985 documentary You Got to Move, Lucy Massie Phenix and Veronica Selver prominently featured Horton and the Highlander School. Horton also inspired the founding of the Myles Horton Organization at the University of Tennessee in 1986. The group organized numerous protests and events in the Chattanooga, Tennessee area, including demonstrations to counter the Ku Klux Klan, and the construction of a shantytown on campus to encourage the university to divest from South Africa.”

Beyond blended learning- towards a fluid discourse of educational conversations

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Steve Wheeler has written an interesting bog post, which deserves unpacking and discussing.

Steve says:

Blended learning (in the established, traditional sense) means a mix of learning activities that involved students learning both in the classroom, and at a distance from the classroom, usually mediated through technology. I am claiming that this type of blended learning – in concept at least – is now outmoded because the boundaries between local and remote have now been substantially blurred.

I think I would largely agree with him although I am not so sure it is due to the blurring of the boundary between local and remote. Reading older papers on technology enhanced learning, there was great emphasis placed on the divide between synchronous and asynchronous communication and how to provide a proper ‘mix’ of technologies facilatating such modes. Today we flip between different modes without thinking about it. Take Skype – if I text someone they may reply straight away or may reply the next day. I may have a series of short episodic conversations with a colleague throughout the day. I may switch from text to audio or video for parts of these conversations. They may be one to one or we may invite others to participants for particular parts of the conversation. Instead of a divide between synchronous or asynchronous communication, tools now support multi modal communication and multi modal learning.

Steve goes on to say:

The new blend is to blur formal and informal learning

Of this I am less convinced. I am in a few problems here because I have often written myself about informal learning. But in truth I am unconvinced of the value of the concept. Indeed there is little agreement even on what the terms formal, informal and non-formal learning mean. If you are interested in this debate there is an excellent literature review by Colley, Hodkinson and Malcom who explore different definitions and uses of the terms. I have tended to use the idea of informal learning in two ways – to refer to learning which takes place outside the formal education system or to learning which takes place in the absence of formal teaching. The problem with the first use of the term is that it refers only to what it is not, rather than to what it is. And in the case of the second, it tends to ignore the influence of what Vykotsly called a More Knowledgeable Other. The More Knowledgeable Other is anyone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner, particularly in regards to a specific task, concept or process – a friend, a peer, a colleague, who can support the scaffolding of  learning. Technology is playing a significant role in blurring boundaries here. If I read Steve Wheeler’s article, think about it and write my own ideas then surely I am learning, and in this case Steve is playing the part of the More Knowledgeable Other in guiding my thinking. Recently one of my computers was overheating. I searched for and found a web site telling me at what temperature the Northbridge chip should be running (it was running much hotter). I then found a YouTube video showing me how to take my computer apart and clean the filters. Is this formal or informal learning? Do I have scaffolding and guidance in my learning? I would suggest I do.

Even more problematic is Steve’s idea of “informal technology”. I think this may just be careless use of terminology. Of course technologies are not informal or formal. However what is certainly true is that most young people today own various technology based devices, which can be used or as John Cook calls it “appropriated” for learning. And as we move towards near ubiquitous connectivity, at least in richer countries, then these devices provide constant access to all kinds of learning – including contact to those with more knowledge than we have. It is interesting to note that most of this learning takes place in the absence of purpose built education technology, rather we appropriate applications designed for business or enterprise use or for entertainment, for learning.

I think more useful than setting a dichotomy between the formal and the informal is to explore the different relationships and contexts in which learning takes place. Last year Jenny Hughes and I made a slidecast called Critical Literacies, Pragmatics and Education as part of a Critical Literacies course being run by Rita Kop and Stephen Downes as part of their ongoing research project on Personal Learning Environments.

In this we referred to the relationships in which learning take place. These include the relationships between learners and teachers, between the learners themselves and between the learners and the wider community.

We went on to look at context. Obviously this includes place or physical context, which could be described as the learning domain. This might be a school or college, the workplace or at home. Important here is the distance between the different domains. Sometimes this distance will be short (say in the case of an apprenticeship involving workplace and school based study), but sometimes there may be a quite broad seperation between the different domains.

A second context is the social, cultural and political environment in which earning takes place. A third – and to my mind critical – context is the idea of what is legitimate learning – what is learnt and how it is learnt. Obviously this involves the idea of control.

Especially important is the context of how we recognise achievement – how outcomes are defined, what value is placed on learning, by whom and how.

We also raised the idea of discourses – the sum total of the conversations around education. In the past, we suggested, education has tended to be a top down discourse with prescribed and structured strategies  for learning. This is changing and now leaners may be more likely to start from practice without a predetermined strategy for learning.

Thus relations and context or learning are becoming fluid and are contently changing. Technology is playing a major role in these changing relationships and contexts. Such a fluid discourse inevitably leads to conflict with an educational structure based on top down educational discourses.

STEM and LEM – which pays the most?

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The de facto end of free education in the UK, and in particuar the imposition of coniderable fees for univeristy courses, which is likely to be extended to vocational programmes, is going to have widespread implications for peoples’ choices of careers.

Inthe next few weeks we will be exploring some of those implications on this blog.

One issue is that people are beginning to exmaine the ‘value’ of a degree in terms fo enhnaced lifetime earnings. And the rseulkts may not be as people have assumed. Governements and goevrnmental bodies have long espoused the importance of the so called STEM subjects – Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths – but figures suggest it may not be these subjects which enjoy the best pay premium.

According to the Guardian:

Male graduates in law, economics and management (LEM), for example, enjoyed faster growth in wages early in their career lifecycle compared to other majors, including Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths). Stem graduates, or those with combined degrees, eventually catch up with those who did LEM but not till much later in the lifecycle. For those opting for arts and other social science degrees, the lifetime returns are markedly lower – especially for men. The subject you study, then, makes a big difference to the investment returns, although, so far, only one institution has suggested subject specific pricing, so the costs are broadly the same across subjects. (Note that our research shows that early-career wage levels are not a good predictor of lifetime earnings – but, be warned, the government’s guidance for students on which subjects and institutions to choose will present data on early earnings.)

Among women, the picture is different. LEM graduates saw the highest and fastest rate of return. But women who did a degree – irrespective of which subject – enjoyed substantially higher lifetime earnings than those who didn’t. This can be read as an indication of the kind of discrimination that female non-graduates still face in the labour market. Moreover, the returns were broadly similar across subjects.