Category Archives: Mature

Managing information or maturing knowledge?

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There have been a number of reports in the wake of the failure of public services to prevent the tragic death of child in London. The story below from the Guardian looks at the impact of the introduction of Management Information Services in social services in the UK. What it reveals is that professional workers are forced to spend increasing amounts of time completing tick box tracking report forms on computers. The result is not increased efficiency and effectivenesss but a failure to sharing information with those that need it. The MIS becmes the centre of attention, not the task – in this case the protecion of vulnerable children.

This is not limited to social wok. Studies we have carried out in the eduction sphere reveal the same tendency. Professional wokers are being diverted away from what they see as their job in the requirement to fill in tracking reports on ill designed Management Information Systems. The inormation held by the MIS is seen as primarily for tracking and funding pruposes. raher than helping with the work. Littlle attention is paid to how an MIS might assist in developing and maturing knowledge. Natural knowledge sharing and development processes, through dialogue and networking are left behind. Often staff develop their own informal systems, to exchange the knowledge that they need, in parallel to official procedures.

We need to review the purpose of such systems. Do we develop systems to help professional wokrers in their job or merely to collect infomation? What is the purpose of the information being collected? Who is it for and why? How can we design systems based on the abilities of ‘knowledge workers’, rather than relying on the number crunching outputs of the machine? And what approaches are need to the design of such human oriented systems? These are not just academic questions, as the report below tragically reveals.

“A government computer system intended to improve the handling of child abuse cases has led to social workers having to spend more than 100 hours for every case filling out forms, cutting the time they have to make visits.

Reports by two universities have revealed that the Integrated Children’s System (ICS), launched in 2005 following the death of Victoria Climbié, is so laborious it typically takes more than 10 hours to fill in initial assessment forms for a child considered to be at risk. A “core assessment” takes a further 48 hours on average, according to government-commissioned research by York University. The system, which cost £30m to implement, creates deadlines that further restrict the time available for family visits.”

“But the pressure on social workers, effectively tied to their desks by bureaucracy, reveals systemic problems in child protection. “Workers report being more worried about missed deadlines than missed visits,” said Professor Sue White, who is studying five child protection departments for the University of Lancaster. “The [computer] system regularly takes up 80% of their day.”

ICS replaced a system where social workers wrote case notes in narrative form, which many argue made it easier for different officials to quickly pick up the details of complex cases.

In the review by the University of York of the first authorities to adopt the system, the use of tick boxes was criticised because of “a lack of precision that could lead to inaccuracy”. It added that the system “obscured the family context”.

The level of detail demanded by ticking boxes “sacrificed the clarity that is needed to make documentation useful,” it concluded.

“If you go into a social work office today there’s no chatter, nobody is talking about the cases, it is just people tapping at computers,” said White.

One social worker interviewed by White’s team said: “I spend my day click- clicking and then I’ll get an email from someone else – say a fostering agency- asking for a bit more information on a child: ‘Could we please have a pen picture of the three children’. It’s horrendous.

“It’s impossible to get a picture of the child,” said another. “It’s all over the place on the computer system … That coupled with the number of people involved in the case makes my life very difficult.”

Eileen Monroe, an expert on child protection at the London School of Economics, said some local authorities are petitioning the government to allow them to drop the system. “The programme is set up to continually nag you, and the child’s misery just doesn’t nag as loudly.”"

Integrating personal learning and working environments

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I have been working with Cristina Costa to write a review paper on Personal Learning and Working Environments. The paper is now avaiable online on the Research section of this web site.

This review paper part of a series of papers commissioned by the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick under the title of ‘Beyond Current Horizons – Working and Employment Challenge’. In turn, in forms part of a larger programme of work under the banner of Beyond Current Horizons that is being managed by FutureLab on behalf of the UK Department for Schools, Children and Families. The brief was to cover:

  • The main trends and issues in the area concerned;
  • Any possible discontinuities looking forward to 2025 and beyond;
  • Uncertainties and any big tensions;
  • Conclusions on what the key issues will be in the future and initial reflections on any general implications for education.

We had also agreed that we would produce such a paper to inform the work of the European Union Mature project which is looking at knowldge maturing and developing Personal and Organisational Learning and Management Environments.

It is a longish paper and covers such issues as:

  • new ways of learning using Web 2.0 schools
  • deschooling society
  • workbased learning and the social shaping of work and technology
  • organisational networks and communities of practice
  • Personal Learning Emvironments
  • the future of universties
  • informal learning
  • knowledge development and sharing

We were given a wide brief to look at what might happen up to 2025 and what developments we thought were likely and what were desireable. We have used the opportunity to think a little more freely than is often possible within the scope of traditional academic papers.

Annotate this paper

We would be very interested in your views on the ideas in this paper. We invite you to use Diigo tools to annotae the paper. If you have not used Diigo before for annotating and leaving comments here is a short introductory video. We invite you also to join the Diigo e-learning 2.0 group and to share your bookmarks through the group.

But we knw some people still prefer paper publications. So you can download an Open Office and a PDF version of the paper below.

workandlearning – PDF vesrion

workandlearning – Open Office version

Learning requires readiness, preparedness and motivation

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Please don’t groan at yet another post on Personal Learning Environments. Well – I hope not becuase there are a few more in the pipeline. Why am I so focused. Besides my interest in how to change what I see as a grossly unfair and non-functional education system, because I am a partner on the EU funded Mature project which seeks to use PLEs to foster knowledge maturation.And I am using this blog as a jotting pad for confused ideas!

The problem with much of the debate for me, is that it is focused on hwo we use PLEs in education – or more narrowly in higher education. As such it is about replacing VLEs, letting go of control, providing services etc. Indeed we spend much of our time defining PLEs by what they are not! But what about those not in education – or at least those for whom formal learning is a episodic event? And what about using PLEs in the workplace? There has been very little dicussion around these issues and yet I think this may be where the real power of PLEs lies. Of couse everyone has their own PLE – if we take the widest sense of an enevironment in which we learn and if we accept that all working environments foster or constrain learning to a different extent. So one issue is simply how to design learning conducive working environments. But in a study we have undertaken for the Mature project (not yet available) we found that individuals have highly idiosyncratic ways of developing, managing and sharing knowledge, ranging from post-it notes and carrier bags to PDAs and voice recorders. On the one hand they are concious of their need for information and knowledge, on the other hand spend little time considering just how they meet such a need. And of course ICT comfidence and competence varies greatly.

We face a number of challenges in introducing PLEs for these knowledge rich workers. To what extent do we want to challenge the personal strategies people already have – especially if they are working for them? How can PLE tools be made to integrate within the working environment? At a more funadamental level what are these tools? What added value will they produce?

Yes – we can develop a range of services – calenders, access to research and resources and can provide these in flexible and multiple formats. But services alone do not mean learning. Much of the present learning is informal and much comes out of involvement in multiple networks – both organisational and personal. How can we build on the power of networks to enhance learning?

What is necessary for learning to take place? In a recent skype channel chat Jenny Hughes suggested that learning depends on readiness, preparedness and motivation. Readiness, she said, is about prerequisite skills and knowledge and physical and intellectual and emotional state or stage of development; preparedness is about having the time, the technology, the environment etc. and motivation is will or desire. If there are opportunties for informal learning in everyday work, then a PLE can assist in the preparedness for learning but can do little for readiness for motivation.

To be continued……

To learn – to find and follow a track

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Jenny Hughes has been undertaking the thankless task of trying to edit (or more to rewrite) an article of mine on Personal Learning Environments as part of a handbook for teachers for the Taccle project.

I am intrigued by her reference ot the orgins of the words ‘curriculum’ and ‘learning’ in this excerpt from the draft:

“Traditionally, knowledge has been conceived of something possed by ‘experts’ . The formal education curriculum is based on the idea that learning can be neatly and conveniently divided into subject areas which in turn are based on traditional university disciplines.  The people who have the knowledge (the teachers) are accorded higher status than those that do not (the learners) and although all good teachers maintain that they learn a lot from their pupils, the passage of information is conceived as being one-way. There are desgnated places (schools) where learning officially takes place, where learning is tested and  which control access to the next stage or level of learning

The new technologies have challenged this status quo.  The explosion of freely available sources of information has increased the range of knowledge available to people and has made it accessible when and where they want it, in bite sized chunks that do not necessarily form a coherent subject discipline.

We are moving from the idea of knowledge being developed and controlled by experts to collaborative knowledge construction which can be facilitated by the use of social software, as we describe above. Even more importantly, we are starting to rethink what qualifies as ‘knowledge’.  Instead of the ‘curriculum’ being defined by experts, communities of people interested in the same things – or even just by being part of a community – are acting as a curriculum.

Interestingly, the word curriculum comes from the latin ‘currere’, which means to run or race and ‘curriculum’ was a race or racecourse. It is easy to see how this was adopted to describe a learning course which had a starting point, travelled along a straight route and reached a finishing point with competitors battling with each other to finish first or to be the best.

Maybe for the first time learning has stopped being a race course. Conversely ‘to learn’ originally meant ‘to find and follow a track’  and this seems to sum up rather well the current shift in emphasis from formal curriculum to informal learning.

This changing model requires not only different approaches but different technologies and implicit is the change from an institutional approach to learning to a more learner centred approach.”

Social Software, Personal Learning Environments and the future of Education

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I accepted an invitation to do a keynote presentation at a conference on Web 2.0 at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal on October 10th. What I dinn’t realise is that they wanted me to write a paper. I am not so keen on formal papers these days – I far prefer multimedia but I finally got down to it. I greatly enjoyed readng up for he paper and quite enjoyed writing it – though am frustrated at all the things I did not say. And I still find the academic text format a bit stifling. Oh – and I hated doing the referencing (though that is my fault – I should have done it as I wrote). Anyway here is the paper. I am trying to out in scribd to see if this makes sense as a way of blogging a paper.

If you prefer you can download the paper here – portplesfin