How to classify and search careers resources?

More news from the excellent icould web site which “gives you the inside story of how careers work. The icould storytellers relate, in their own words, their real life career journeys. There are over a thousand easy to search,varied and unique career videos as well as hundreds of written articles. From telecoms engineers to police officers, from landscape gardeners to web designers, from engine drivers to zookeepers; they talk about what they do, what it’s like, how they came to be where are and their hopes for the future.”

the problem with any such site is how to classify information and even more so how to make it searchable. Yes tag clouds help. And of course you can search by keywords. But when we are talking about careers (and many other topics – for example Open Educational Resources) it is not so easy. On the one hand there is the need to make specific information easily accessible, on the other hand the aim to let people explore options they might not have thought of. And of course much depends on qualification requirements. My own very limited research found that most young people do not go to official careers resources but just enter search words into Google – with very variable results.Furthermore, they seemed to have a limited ability to judge the varci8ty or authority of search returns sumo wrestling suits.

A press release from icould Director, David Arnold says:

In response to a major piece of user testing and feedback earlier in the year, conducted for us by the International Centre for Guidance Studies at the University of Derby, we have completely revised our homepage, changed the structure of our content and made our functionality more explicit.  This will make it easier for our users to personalise icould content, search out what is important to them and find what they need to inspire the next step on their career journey.  As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions for further improvements and are grateful for your links, tweets, likes and recommendations.

I tested their new search wizard which asks users

  1. What types of job are you interested in?
  2. What subjects do you study, or enjoy most?
  3. What type of company would you like to work for?
  4. What kind of working lifestyle would suit you best?
  5. What qualifications do you have?

It came up with probably too many results. but they were genuinely career directions I might have been interested in. And I far prefer this broader exploratory approach to many of the very dubious psychometric tools on the market, which seem to provide all kinds of strange results based on algorithms which make a lot of assumptions around our lives and interests which might or might not be true.

 

 

Wales to encourage schools to make full use of social networking technologies

Leighton Andrews, Wales Assembly Government Minister for Education and Skills, has announced an ambitious agenda in response to an independent review of digital classroom teaching. Of particular note is the commitment to “a new approach to the use of social networking technologies in education” through “encouraging schools to make full use of social technologies in order to engage learners and improve learning outcomes.”
Andrews says:

In previous years, local authorities have been asked to block access to social networking sites in schools, libraries and youth clubs, as a result of very understandable concerns about online predators, cyberbullying and the risk of disruption to classroom activities. However, this policy can have adverse effects. It deprives schools of access to tools and resources which might otherwise be used creatively and constructively in education both within and beyond the classroom. More importantly, it means that children are most likely to be using these sites outside the school, at home, or on mobile devices, in environments which may be unsupervised and where they have less access to informed guidance and support on how to stay safe online.
In 2008, Wales was the first country in the UK to introduce the teaching of safe and responsible use of the Internet into both the primary and secondary school curriculum. The underpinning approach was that we first teach children to use the Internet safely under supervision, and then help them to develop the skills and understanding they need to manage their own risk as they use the Internet independently. Enabling access to social networking sites in schools will be consistent with this approach, providing pupils with the opportunity to learn safe, responsible and considerate online behaviours in the context of supported educational activities. It will also help schools to include parents in these activities.”

We have long argued that blocking of social networking (and other web sites) in schools was a backward and futile step. Lets hope that other countries follow the lead of Wales.

The right to work

When I was at school, I never had a Saturday job, or even a paper round, although many of my friends did. My parents were afraid that working would interfere with my education. But I did work in the summer holidays and after leaving school worked for a year before going to university. And I think I learned as much working as I ever did at school. Indeed, the importance of work experience was shown up in our European funded G8WAY project on school to work and university to work transitions.

The Guardian newspaper has drawn attention to a study by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) on part time jobs.

The study found that “the proportion of teenagers combining part-time jobs with school or college has slumped from 40% in the 1990s to around 20% now, according to a government agency. Latest figures show that 260,000 teenagers have a Saturday job compared with 435,000 in 1997.”

UKCES say that there are multiple reasons for this. “The trend is not just recession-related but the result of an increasing expectation that young people should stay on at school, as well as a dwindling number of Saturday jobs, according to the report. Many of the jobs that young people do, such as bar work, are in long-term decline, and are forecast to stagnate or decline further over the next decade.”

The lack of opportunity for paid work is preventing young people becoming independent and in many of the case studies we undertook through the G8WAY project, resulting in considerable family tensions.

And there is an irony here. At the very time young people are being denied the right to work, employers are increasingly demanding work experience, as a precursor to employment. The result is that many young people are being forced to undertaken internships, either at a low pay rate or even without pay. That such internships exist, suggest that there are jobs. It is just employers do not want to pay.

 

Boundary Crossing and Learning

I have been long interested in the idea of boundary objects especially in relation to the use of technology for learning in the workplace. In general I think one of the issues with Technology Enhanced Learning is that we have tended to ignore the importance of physical objects in learning and practice.

Following the presentation by Alan Brown and myself on Technologically Enhanced Boundary Objects (for use in careers guidance) at the final Mature-IP review meeting, Uwe Riss kindly referred us to two papers:

This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept by Susan Leigh Star

and

Boundary Crossing and Boundary Objects by Sanne F. Akkerman and Arthur Bakker.

Sadly neither is available for open access (I have university access but I find it Customized Inflatables very frustrating when there is no open access to important work).

I haven’t read Star’s paper yet, but found the paper by Akkerman and Bakker very useful. They define boundaries as “sociocultural differences that give rise to discontinuities in interaction and action.” They have undertaken an extensive literature review of the use of the idea of boundary crossing in education. In particular I think that Baktin’s idea of ‘dialogicality’ helps explain how learning takes place with multiple sources of ideas and knowledge (which some are referring to as ‘abundance’, through the internet as well as through structured, course based learning.

Bakhtin’s basic line of reasoning was that others or other meanings are required for any cultural category to generate meaning and reveal its depths:

Contextual meaning is potentially infinite, but it can only be actualized when accompanied by another (other’s) meaning, if only by a question in the inner speech of the one who understands. Each time it must be accompanied by another contextual meaning in order to reveal new aspects of its own infinite nature (just as the word reveals its meanings only in context). (Bakhtin, 1986, pp. 145–146)

This Bakhtinian notion of dialogicality comes to the fore in the various claims on the value of boundaries and boundary crossing for learning: learning as a process that involves multiple perspectives and multiple parties. Such an understanding is different from most theories on learning that, first, often focus on a vertical process of progression in knowledge or capabilities (of an individual, group, or organization) within a specific domain and, second, often do not address aspects of heterogeneity or multiplicity within this learning process.

In the second part of their research Akkerman and Bakker look at the “four dialogical learning mechanisms of boundaries”:

  1. identification, which is about coming to know what the diverse practices are about in relation to one another;
  2. coordination, which is about creating cooperative and routinized exchanges between practices;
  3. reflection, which is about expanding one’s perspectives on the practices; and,
  4. transformation, which is about collaboration and codevelopment of (new) practices.

The results of creeping privatisation

The reality of the political drive to privatise education in England is becoming real.

Young people have traditionally had access to careers guidance and advice through a national careers service, although under the past Labour government this was reorganised into a series of private companies, generally called Connexions, that bid for contracts based on client services.  Now, despite some requirements for schools to provide careers advice, the central contracts for Connexions services have been withdrawn.

Nearly every carers organisation has announced major redundancies, a number have simply collapsed. Most of the remaining services have rebranded as CX instead of the clumsy Connexions name.

However new business models remain elusive. Whilst competition for remaining public funding is fierce, many of the companies have formed alliances to bid for resources. Most are trying to sell services but this is resulting in an over crowded market, especially as media and other organisations start moving in.

Many are also considering offering paid for services. One careers company in south east England is now targeting their web site at parents and carers, offering careers interviews for their child at £50 or a psychometric test for £90 with a follow up meeting to look at the results for a further £30.

It can be argued that the quality of careers provision has been variable in the past, not helped by frequent changes in policy and funding mechanisms. And I suppose the level of charges will certainly put pressure on the organisations to provide high quality services. Yet access to these services will now be dependent on income and it is likely that the clients who have gained most from careers services in the past – NEETs and those with low educational attainments – will be the very ones with parents unable to afford such services.

And I fear this will also be so for other sections of education as privatisation moves forward.

It is important to note that the changes described above only apply to England – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have maintained a public careers service.