Shaping the future

Welcome to the future? Whenever we consider the future, it is always elusive, and always just around the corner. It is never quite here. We live in the present. All the time. All each of us have is our memories of the past, and a future that is imaginary. Until something happens, we really don't know what the future will bring, and anyone who says they know what the future holds is either a liar or deluded. Forget the soothsayers, the horoscope writers, the clairvoyants and the crystal ball gazers. Their prophecies of the future are nothing more than bland, generalised predictions which can be interpreted in many ways. If they get it wrong, it is difficult for anyone to prove anything. We just don't know what will happen next. That's probably a good thing.

William Gibson once famously remarked: 'The future is here - it's just not very evenly distributed.' This is a well used quote, but what did he mean by this? Some would suspect this is a reference to the digital divide, the haves and have nots in our society. For me it is more profound than that. It is that some see a different future to others, and there are many interpretations of exactly what the future holds. Some view it with trepidations, seeing only problems, while others see the future as a never ending set of opportunities to exploit.

How much can we shape our own futures? As a community, how much can we invest into our present to secure a better future for ourselves and our children? The answer is obvious - the more we invest in the present, the more we will reap in the future. But we cannot control everything. There are randomly variable events. George Orwell once said 'He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past'. This is why the media - television, newspapers, radio, internet, gaming - have so much influence over public perceptions. For slightly different reasons it is also why teachers can wield such power in the classroom. We know what technologies we can use to create excellent learning opportunities for the students in our care. We also know from research what the pitfalls and caveats are. We know for example, that technology used for technology's sake is usually a mistake. We also know that learners engage better when they have tools to use they feel comfortable with and enjoy using. The balance decision is ours to make. What we don't know much about (but we can guess) is what technologies are just around the corner, waiting to invade the classroom. What we certainly don't know is what effects new technology will have on learning, on our professional practice, on our daily lives. We can watch the trends, but who would have thought for example, that mobile phones, a tool developed for business and leisure, could be applied so effectively in teaching and learning? Conversely, who would have predicted the consternation and controversy mobile phones would cause in many, many school contexts? 

The subject of my closing keynote at this weekend's free to attend Reform Symposium online global conference will be 'The Future of Learning'. Here's the link to the Elluminate Room we will be using. I will draw on over 30 years of my own research and experience in the learning technology field to attempt to unravel this conundrum. I will discuss the trends in technology evolution and trace the social movements that have led us to this point in the history of education. I'm going to examine a number of ideas including personal learning environments, social media, open scholarship, resistance to change, content curation, augmented reality and the semantic web. In doing so, I hope to inspire and also challenge teachers to reflect on their practices, uses of technology, and instill hope for the future. The future is ours to own. 


The last word on this subject goes to President Barack Obama who declared: 'We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it'. 


Image source by 'Back of the Napkin'


Shaping the future by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Reusable cooking objects

Recently a lot of emphasis has been placed on sustainability. Sustainable this, sustainable that. Here at the University of Plymouth we had a CETL - a Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning - dedicated to Sustainable Futures. We have also seen a movement toward 'reusable learning objects' (For many teachers, sustainable education might simply be about actually keeping students interested for a full hour). I guess it's not simply about being 'green' or environmentally conscious. It's also about minimising effort of the creation of learning resources, and adapting existing content into new contexts or for new groups of learners. It's about sharing. It's about common sense. I just don't know why we had to invent a name for it.

I was fascinated last year, while walking around the huge sprawling open market of Serekunda in the Gambia, to see a huge 'cottage industry' dedicated to recycling old aluminium, tin and other metals into really useful objects. The picture above shows some of the products of this labour - salvaged aluminium from old cars, refrigerators, cola cans and other household goods that have lost their inherent value. We walked into one of the market stalls, and out through the back into a yard which resembled Dante's inferno. Everywhere we looked there were smelting furnaces, and all around in the smoke, people were melting down metal and remoulding it into useful cooking utensils. The picture below shows a guy fabricating a cooking pot. Got me thinking about education.

How much content do we actually waste, and how often do we 'reinvent the wheel'? I remember a few years ago having 14 cohorts of students, all studying the same content. I simply set up a wiki and populated it with a set of learning activities. I then replicated the wiki 13 times more and let it loose. The result was that the students were each contained in their own little groups, studying the same materials but enjoying small group conversations that were unique and relevant to their own cohort. It didn't take long to do once the first wiki had been established, and in a sense, I re-used the same content over a dozen times. It should only be a small step from there to reusing other people's content. But it's actually a huge step, because many teachers want to protect their own intellectual property and are not willing to share their ideas or content with others. The Creative Commons movement is going some way to challenging this mindset, and we are also seeing the rise of open scholarship, where teachers and academics are willing not only share their content, but also to open themselves up to constructive criticism from their peers on the web. I share all my slideshows and papers on Slideshare for free, and only ask for acknowledgement. (Go on, click on the link and help yourself. You know you want to).

After witnessing the collective actions and sharing culture that exist among the poor people of the Gambia and realising that they are compelled to take this approach simply to survive, I am even more determined to share my own content and encourage others to do the same. Seeing how the people of Gambia use everything and throw nothing away makes me very conscious about our own wasteful consumer society and how selfish I can be with my own 'property'. Reusable learning objects....It makes a lot of sense to me now.


Click here for more pictures of Gambia.


Reusable cooking objects by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Around the world in three days

The Reform Club is the London gentleman's club to which Victorian adventurer Phileas Fogg returns after his fictional epic, and highly entertaining journey around the world in 80 days. Jules Verne's hero made it back in time and against all odds, to claim his reward of £20,000. The Reform Club is still there, and ironically, it hasn't changed all that much since the days of Jules Verne. But reform is here and there are some changes being made in the world of education.

This week, the Reform Symposium will take us around the world again, three times in three days as it launches its third global conference. The expected 8,000 participants will be located around the world across all 24 time zones, enabling the conference to be virtually non-stop between Friday 29 - Sunday 31 July. That in itself is quite an awesome concept. Billed as a worldwide e-conference, and boasting a schedule of more than 75 presentations, invited panels and 12 keynotes, the Reform Symposium promises to be an event of huge significance for the education world. One teacher on Twitter said today that they looked forward to learning some new things while still in their pyjamas (I won't mention their name...)

Lots of tweeps are sporting the REFORM logo around the edges of their profile pics and David Wees has created a Twitter list of all the organisers and presenters for the symposium, all adding to the building excitement. The great line up of keynote speakers for RSCON3 includes Alec Couros, Steve Hargadon, Paula White, George Couros, Chuck Sandy, Jo Hart, Pamela Burnard, Steven Anderson, John Davitt, Terry Freedman and Phil Hart. I am delighted to have been invited to give the closing keynote address on Sunday at 2200 hours (British Summer Time). You can work out your own timezone for any presentation throughout the three days simply by going to the Reform Symposium site and using the excellent timezone tool. Some of my audience may well be in a state of undress, but I will be wearing my best suit and tie (as the pigs land for refuelling) to present from the confines of my home office, using my faithful laptop Nigel, and my Elluminate headset.

Expect the Twitter stream to go crazy, as this week the Reform Symposium takes us around the world in 3 days. See you online!

Image by EraPhernalia


Around the world in three days by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Three things all teachers need

Recently I took part in a 3-way Skype podcast recording for TeacherCast.net, which was hosted by Jeff Bradbury, who is based in Philadelphia, USA. My co-panellist was Mark Greentree, who was speaking from Sydney, Australia. One of the scheduled questions which we never got around to addressing was: What should a parent expect from a teacher in the 21st Century? This is actually quite an interesting question and if we had been given enough time to answer it, I would have said something along these lines:

The question acknowledges the direct interest parents have over their children's education, and reminds teachers of the need to keep parents informed of their children's progress. As a parent of three children who have now all left school (where has the time gone?), I know that I was always interested in what my kids had been getting up to in school, and what they had learnt. But I was also interested in the methods the teachers had employed to help my kids learn. That may have been because I am a teacher educator myself, and I have a professional interest. How many other parents who are non-educators actually think about the methods and tools teachers are using? Also, beyond the fact that the teachers of their children are qualified educators and have been police-checked, how much do parents want to know about teachers or the methods they use? What should parents expect of teachers in the 21st Century?

Apart from the surge in technology use, and the new skills teachers need to adopt, implement and harness new digital media and tools (a subject for another blogpost), I would argue that little has changed in our expectations of good educators. In this post I'm not going to dwell on digital skills. Instead I'm going to focus on three essential things teachers need to practice, and without which children would be poorer.

The first thing parents should expect from teachers is their ability to inspire children to learn. This is vitally important. Yes, it helps that teachers are experts in their own subject areas, and it yes, it is important that teachers are organised and can maintain some kind of discipline in the classroom, but I would like to argue that the ability to inspire is more important that all of these. All teachers should aspire to be an inspirational catalyst for learning. Enthusiasm for learning, a passion for their subject and the ability to get kids excited about something new is vitally important in the shaping of young minds. You can't teach enthusiasm or passion, but it can certainly be infectious.

Another allied skill we should expect from teachers is an ability to understand the child's perspective. Good teachers have the ability to place themselves in the position of the child, and ask themselves, how would I have felt in that situation? This is the basis of good pedagogy, and was referred to by Jean Piaget as 'decentering'. Many of us, as we grow older, tend to forget the experiences we had when we were in school. Intuitive teachers understand what kids experience and know how to maximise those experiences. They know how to tap into the sense of wonder a child has when she sees something new for the first time. They recignise the importance of the need to touch or taste, to directly feel and relish a new experience and the desire to question, to experiment and to ask 'what if...?' These are manifestations of childhood all teachers should remember. Good teachers recognise that children need this kind of experimental space to learn.

Parents should also expect teachers to give creative freedom to children. Although teachers are hard pressed for time, the very best know the importance of play and can create playful learning spaces. Children have great imagination, but until it is given the opportunity to be expressed outwardly, it is difficult to share or celebrate. The best teachers do not always insist on the 'right answer' or the correct way to do something. They don't dismiss children who offer outlandish ideas or alternative suggestions. Sure, children needs some facts and rules, but they also need to be able to question those facts and find out what happens if someone does break those rules. Children should be free to make mistakes without fear of punishment, and should be able to express themselves creatively and explore their world in safety.

There are many other things we should expect from good teachers and I invite readers of this blog to post additional values and skills below in the comments box. And how can technology help teachers to create such environments? Well, that's the topic for a later blogpost...

Image by Yago Veith


Three things all teachers need by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The great collective

When there is live TV coverage of an event do you watch the entire broadcast or just the highlights? The answer of course will depend on a number of factors, including how interested you are in the event, and how much time you have available to you. It's exactly the same with content on the web. Earlier this month I wrote about the 'tsunami of content' online that threatens to swamp us all. Just about everyone using the web today is creating content on a daily basis. How do we find the gold dust content amidst all the dross and trivia that exists on the internet?

Search engines have their place, and of course, we tend to use them a lot. Some of the more intelligent search engines are morphing into answer engines, computing your question against highly structured data (see for example Wolfram Alpha), and providing focused information. Often, for busy professionals, even this is not enough. Then there is problem of how to organise your content when you actually find it. Many are using tools such as Delicious.com or Diigo.com to tag, store and share their favourite content. These tools are also excellent and well used, but are they enough to cope with the vast quantity of content we want to keep? Wouldn't it be nice to have up to date, regular content, all presented in one place?

Enter the digital curation tools. There is a very special breed of web users out there that we call 'the curators.' In a sense, curators are a little like their counterparts in museums, because they tend to trade in very specialised, focused content. Anyone can be a digital curator. As a part of the great collective, curators choose a topic they are interested in, and then search and display dynamic content related to this topic, using one or more digital curation tools. They are collectors of the virtual and ephemeral and they have some great tools. Scoop.it is a very useful and attractive curation tool, enabling summaries and snapshots of related content from blogs, media sharing sites and other social media to be displayed, usually in two columns. Check out my own Scoop.it site Future School. Storify is another style of curation tool, enabling the curator to search for specific content from social media sites that can be sequenced into a blog style story. The curator can add their own text, and embed the final product into their blog. This short video explains how it's done. A third curation tool is Pearltrees, which works as a kind of connective network of content, which can be shared, repurposed and linked in a number of ways across social media platforms. The Pearltrees Teams group function also enables users to collaborate to create shared curated collections of content. Here's the video demonstrating how Pearltrees works. All three tools allow conversations and further sharing, and all three are very attractive as a means of making sense of the vast amount of content there is on the web. There are of course many other tools being developed that can also perform similar tasks of consolidating and accumulating content, and offering it in a digest form to busy professionals. The great collective it seems, are becoming the great collectors.

Image by Dieter Drescher


The great collective by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Breaking down fences

Seth Godin's blog is always good value, but his post today is quite profound. He writes about his avid reading of the entire collection of one library's science fiction stock during his high school days and concludes that "Expertise is a posture as much as it is a volume of knowledge". Expertise does not come easily. It takes hard work and a lot of tenacity to become expert at anything, whether it is sport, music, art or and other realm of knowledge or skill. Godin urges us to 'go deep' and to read everything we can on our chosen subject, and on the surface, this seems a no brainer. We read for a degree. Reading is what it takes to master a topic.

I tell all potential PhD candidates I meet the same thing. If they wish to complete a research degree, they must become an expert in a very narrow domain, and through their research they should contribute something unique to that field. In order to do that, they need to explore their field thoroughly. It means reading a lot. It means reflecting on your own practice, and thinking critically about your field. It means finding where the edge of that field is, and sometimes - if you're bold enough - even breaking a few fences down to venture beyond into uncharted territory.

It doesn't just apply to PhD candidates. Anyone who is a professional should try to be the best they can be. What about your own professional practice? How do you find the edge of your field of knowledge and expertise? What do you read and where do you find the edgy stuff?

Although journal articles and books are a great source of knowledge, many articles go quickly out of date, and were probably in most cases already out of date by the time they were published, due to ponderous editorial and review processes, and a general back-log of articles that wait in a queue to be published. It's the same for just about every closed pay-per-view journal. Open access journals are better - they are generally more up to date, and are of course free to read. Many can be found online and usually, as soon as an article is accepted, it is quickly published. Better still, if you wish to approach the very very edge of your field, search for blogs written by the leaders in the field. You can gain access to the latest thoughts and ideas posted onto the web direct from the mind of the author. You can't get much more immediate than that. You may receive more understanding and wisdom from a just-written-blog by a reputable researcher or leading thinker than you will ploughing through several dozen paper based journal articles. You need to find your own pathway. Any way you do it, go deep, search for the edge of your field and then break down a few fences.

Image by Lionel Grove


Breaking down fences by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Facing the front

A guest blogpost by Andrea Kuszewski in Scientific American earlier this month really made me think. Entitled 'The Educational Value of Creative Disobedience', her article deftly and firmly demolishes the premises and practices of current school practices, and hypothesises what would happen if children were given creative freedom to learn. Kuszewski's first hypothesis in particular, is a must for all teachers to consider:

Teaching and encouraging kids to learn by rote memorization and imitation shapes their brain and behavior, making them more inclined towards linear thinking, and less prone to original, creative thinking.

Kuszewski goes on to critique the school system as the main culprit behind restriction of creative thinking:

Let’s take a look at our typical education paradigm: From the earliest days of school, we hammer specific scholastic values into our students: pay attention, watch the teacher, imitate what the teacher does, stay in your seat, don’t question authority, and receive praise. But instead of teaching children to think, we are teaching them to memorize. Instead of encouraging them to innovate, we expect them to follow the outline and adhere to rules.

This resonated with me. I was always told to 'face the front', stay in my seat and pay attention to my teacher when I was in school. You see, the 'front' was where the teacher was, where the blackboard was located, and the front was ostensibly where all the action was. Learning whilst 'facing the front' was supposed to make me more attentive, focus my mind, enable me to grasp what the teacher was saying, and memorise the facts. It was all very much a 'mug and jug' education. I was the mug (in more ways than one) and the teacher was the jug - filled to brimming with knowledge which s/he imparted by pouring it into my empty mug. Yet in the words of the poet William Butler Yeats - "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." This is the essence of engagement. It's a shame I was forced by my schools to be a pail.

Later that academic year, I was expected to sit down, again facing the front, and regurgitate all I had learnt before I was allowed to progress to the next stage of my indoctrination - sorry, education. But facing the front didn't work for me. I was too easily distracted by the butterfly outside the classroom window, or the jet aircraft screaming by overhead. I was too interested in catching the eye of the pretty girl sitting across the room from me, or the card games that were going on under the tables next to me. Instead of taking notes, I was more intent on creating cartoon characters, writing stories and poems and drawing fantastic scenes in my exercise books.

I was also a fidget. I didn't want to stay sat still in my uncomfortable chair, facing constantly in one direction. I wanted to move around and face other directions, because in doing so, I was less bored, I could see the rest of my classmates, and it gave me much more freedom to explore what I was learning, to experiment, to ask the 'what if' questions, and to take risks. I liked walking around as I was learning. My teachers frowned on this, and insisted that if I couldn't sit still, stay in my seat and face the front, I would be punished. Punishment in those days was something to be feared - the cane (in my English school) or the strap (in my Scottish school). So I reluctantly sat and faced the front, and became more and more bored and frustrated with school and sadly, more disenchanted with learning. School was something to endure rather than enjoy.

It was only later, when I left school and began my career that I eventually became switched on to learning and began to enjoy formal study. It took me many years to shake out of the school induced learning lethargy. I was in my late 30s when I successfully completed my first degree with first class honours. I achieved this because I was interested, I had discovered my own creative and intellectual abilities and was able to think for myself. I could move around while I studied. I had found my own front to face. I wonder how many other people experienced (and continue to experience) this same situation?

As Richard Merrick recently suggested 'People need to change. Organisations don't'. And there's the rub - schools, colleges and universities are organisations that change very slowly if they change at all, but the people in them, the teachers, lecturers and professors, do need to change. Teachers need to find their own front to face. We need to realise that everything we do changes the structure of our brains - and that goes for our students too. We need to encourage our learners to do things and experience things that change the structures of their brains positively. We need to avoid imposing the 'face the front' syndrome which is largely responsible for conditioning learners to blindly obey the rules, submit to the status quo without question, and follow instructions rather than thinking for themselves. We should move away from the ludicrous idea that 'one size fits all' and the tyranny of homogeneity. We must provide creative freedom and room for individual expression in the classroom. Let's provide students the space to decide where their own front is.

Image by James Wilkinson


Facing the front by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

My awesome PLN

Earlier today I tweeted this - "I'm relying on you PLN. Without you I am just a single mind."... and of course, I meant it. My PLN is my community of interest and the mirror of my practice. Nobody learns in a vacuum, not even Robinson Crusoe. I cannot begin to describe the amount of new things I have discovered, and continue to discover every day, on Twitter and on other online social environments. It's a treasure house of ideas. It's like having a cafe within reach at all hours of the day. Better still, it's like having a cafe where all your friends, most respected colleagues and also your favourite sages and teachers are always available to sit down and share their ideas with you. The power of this PLN (personal learning network) should not be underestimated. The PLN has always been there of course, but never before has it been available to us in such a widely distributed, accessible and immediate format. The social web has transformed learning networks and is gathering pace as social media and handheld devices continue to evolve in tandem, providing anytime, anyplace learning that was inconceivable for most of the last century. As heard on the BBC Click Technology programme today, social media is the water cooler and the street corner of the Internet. We live in very exciting times.

My PLN is awesome. Sure, I have had a hand in selecting many of the people I follow on Twitter and those I link up with on Facebook, so I have shaped it. But PLNs also take on a life of their own, and people keep popping up who attract me to follow them. This kind of serendipity is what helps to make my PLN awesome. As I continue to learn from others, so the onus is on me to share what I have learnt. There can be nothing precious about this. Anyone who hoards knowledge in today's connected society is deluding themselves that that can actually benefit them in any way. It won't. Give what you have learnt away. Share it with your friends. Make it free to all those who are interested. You won't lose anything, but you will build stronger social and intellectual ties with your community of practice and interest, and as you share your own knowledge, you will discover that it comes back to you with interest.


My awesome PLN by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Going the extra mile

During my undergraduate degree programme, I remember assembling with a small group of fellow students in a room to start our new module on social psychology. We knew our new lecturer's name, but beyond that we knew very little about her. So we sat and waited for her to appear. And we sat and waited. At around five minutes after we were due to start, we began to wonder if perhaps she was already sat in the room with us, posing as a student, conducting some bizarre psychological experiment. It's amazing how paranoid psychology students can become. At ten minutes we began speculating on whether she had been delayed by traffic, or worse, had been involved in an accident. At around 12 minutes past the hour, the door banged noisily open, and in burst this strange, dark clad woman with a black hat jammed down over her face. In her arms she had half a dozen old Tesco carrier bags, which she threw against the wall. She stalked over to the whiteboard and without a single word of greeting to us, began writing a string of strange and esoteric words. This continued for a few more minutes, as we sat bewildered, perplexed, and yes... increasingly annoyed, at having our time wasted by this strange, anonymous black clad woman.

Finally, she turned, removed her hat and faced us. She asked us to write down in a few words what we thought of her. She went out and changed into a more colourful outfit (which was in the Tesco carrier bags), and returned, a pleasant and friendly woman. 'This is the real me', she smiled. She admitted that what she had just performed, in front of a group of strangers, was a very big risk to take, and that it had taken a lot of courage for her to go through with the charade. She told us she had been very worried that the whole episode could so easily have backfired and been a total disaster.

It was a very creative lesson, and we learnt a lot about our perceptions and prejudices that day. We also learnt about powerful ideas such as identity, presence, interaction and representation of reality. Our opinions of our lecturer, when we examined them, ranged from 'weird', 'crazy' and 'rude', to expressions such as 'she should have been on time', 'she's bald!' and 'she must be a witch.' We all laughed, but we realised the import of the performance. We learnt a very important lesson that day which set us up extremely well for the entire social psychology module. We learnt a deep lesson about ourselves and the positions we take in the social world, because our lecturer had decided she was going to take a risk and go the extra mile, and in so doing, facilitate a very powerful experience that none of us would ever forget. I'm so glad she did.

As a teacher, how much do you do that is above and beyond the call of duty? Do you ever go the extra mile? How much does creativity cost you? Many teachers do put in that extra bit of effort, taking risks, trying something new and creative, to engage students more, make them think more deeply, or enhance their learning in some way. Taking risks is not just a part of being a teacher, it's a part of being human.

Image source by Richard Pullen


Going the extra mile by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The personal web

With the Southampton PLE Conference #PLE_SOU at full throttle, I thought it would be a good time to reiterate my views on the personal web. Personal Web Tools (PWTs) are thought by some to be synonymous with PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) but the two should not be confused. The authors of the Horizon Report (I cannot recommend the Horizon Report series highly enough) succinctly define the personal web as"a term coined to represent a collection of technologies that confer the ability to reorganize, configure and manage online content rather than just viewing it". The report goes on to define personal webs as self created, and consisting of online tools that suit each individual's unique preferences, styles and needs. Sound like a PLE? Almost, but not quite.

My view is that PWTs sit inside a PLE but they are not the whole story. I believe the PLE extends beyond personal web tools to encompass other tools and resources, such as paper based resources and broadcast media such as television and radio, as well as conversations with other people, realia experiences and so on. Having said that, each and every one of the above could be mediated through web tools, but they are not exclusively so. I attempted to map these components out in a post entitled Anatomy of a PLE.

At its core, the personal web is also very proactive: The Horizon Report gave an excellent, if somewhat idealised conceptualisation of the personal web: "Using a growing set of free and simple tools and applications, it is easy to create customized, personal web-based environments — a personal web — that explicitly supports one’s social, professional, learning and other activities via highly personalized windows to the networked world. Online material can be saved, tagged, categorized, and repurposed without difficulty..."

I recognise that there is a problem here, and this has been pointed out by some of those who have responded to my Two fingered salute post and was also touched on during yesterday's session at the PLE conference in Southampton. It is this: Not everyone has the skills to use, or is willing to use personal web tools. For those who don't, the institutional VLE (or sadly, no web based use at all) is an alternative.

This may sound like a climb down from my position on the death of the VLE, but It is not. I have always believed in a hybrid solution and indeed use one in my own professional practice, but for the sake of the polemic momentum, I'm advocating that institutions seriously reappraise their use of the VLE (read 'managed learning environment'). Much of it is dross, creative thinking is stifled, true collaboration is constrained, many students hate it, and many of the staff are not all that keen either (because it creates a lot of hard work with very little pay-off). Where do you go it you want to learn something new? Certainly not the VLE. The institutional VLE cannot by any stretch of the imagination, be perceived as a personal web - it is often too sterile and homogenised - but I concede that it can be a useful, safe and content rich starting point for those who are embarking on learning through the web.

Image source by Freefoto.com


The personal web by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Everyone has one

Everyone has one - a personal learning environment, that is. Just look around when you are next sat on a bus or train, and you will see people sat listening with earbuds or using their mobile phones. Some will be reading books, or Kindles. Others will be discussing current affairs with their friends, or reading newspapers. It's quite simple. We all learn. We all use tools to help us learn. Personal learning environments or PLEs, are the collection of tools (not just online) that enable us to connect, create and share content with our own communities of interest and practice. Mine will be different to yours, because my choices and preferences about what and how I learn are different to yours. And what you choose to use personalises your learning, making it uniquely yours.


Today at the Personal Learning Environment conference in Southampton, delegates debated whether students actually have the competency to build their own PLEs. A Twitter discussion ensued, but ultimately, I think the wrong question was asked. Why should we question whether students have the competency to build their own PLEs, when in fact most learners already have their own PLE structure of tools sorted out when they arrive at university. As they gain more knowledge of their subject, broaden their personal learning networks and gain access to more content, so they modify their PLE to accommodate all the necessary storage, tagging and co-creation of content that ensues. Graham Attwell, in a recent keynote at the EDEN Dublin conference, made the profound statement that 'competency' is a socially and culturally constructed concept that has many interpretations. So the question is problematic on at least two levels. It depends on what you mean by competency.

The question that should have been asked was: Do students have the necessary skills to apply their informal PLEs in formal learning contexts? In other words, do they have the ability to use the loose aggregation of Web 2.0 tools (iGoogle, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube etc) to help them to engage more deeply with their learning? Do they have the prerequisite skills to apply these tools in a manner that gives them an advantage in their course of study? When I was an undergraduate, I used all kinds of tricks to short cut my study and buy me time. These included getting my hands on next year's course materials from previous students, and finding out what the assessment questions were likely to be when I finally sat them. It worked, and I emerged with a first class honours degree. Doesn't work for everyone, and that's why university staff should not attempt to impose tools onto students. Each student certainly has the competency to build their own PLEs and to decide what their tools and preferences for learning are. They are experts in them, after all.

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” - Dr Suess.

Image source by Denise Parker


Everyone has one by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Just a minute

The sheer volume of content being created and posted to the web is overwhelming. In a post  brought to my attention today, Kelly Hodgkins claims that if we paused the web for 60 seconds we would miss the birth of more than 1500 new blog posts, almost 100,000 new tweets, 20,000 posts on Tumblr, 600 new videos (more than 24 hours) uploaded to YouTube and at least 12,000 new ads on Craigslist. Such a claim must also take into account that much of this content will be quite worthless to anyone but the person uploading it, of which more later. These statistics also fail to take into account all the other content that is being generated on, for example Flickr (more than 3000 images each minute), Wikipedia, Facebook (3 billion photos and 20 million videos uploaded every month), Myspace, Wiktionary, Vimeo, Picasa and innumerable other user generated content repositories. Many similar web user statistics can be found on the Royal Pingdom website. Be warned though that all web statistics, particularly those related to social media, go quickly out of date because what we are talking about here is exponential. We are overwhelmed by a tsunami of content on the web, and just trying to find what we need, even with the most intelligent search engines, can be compared to trying to take a drink from the nozzle of a pressure hose.

Volume of content is not the only issue. We are (and should be) increasingly concerned about the quality of content we find on the web. No teacher worth their salt would play young children a video they hadn't previously screened and vetted for suitability. That would be courting disaster. One wag at the foot of Hodgkins's web stats blogpost left a comment that in 60 seconds there would also be 800 hours of porn downloaded and at least 35,000 Twitter and Facebook posts about Justin Bieber. There is however, no indication if he was speaking as one of the main contributors to these statistics. Yes, we are all aware of the large amount of dross that sits on the web, but the most insidious and potentially the most dangerous, is content that is almost accurate, or blatantly wrong but believable. How do we filter out content that is good from content that is bad? More importantly, how do we educate students into being prudent about what sites they obtain their content from? How can we know that content is safe, appropriate, accurate and up to date?

Those and associated questions will be the focus for the Concede User Generated Conference that takes place on 14th September in Oiera, Portugal as a part of the EFQUEL Innovation  Forum (September 14-16). The Concede Project, which has concerned itself with investigating the quality of user generated content in higher education over the last 2 years, will host the event, and is giving away a number of all expenses paid delegate places to those who wish to present a paper at the event. For full details on how to apply for free all expense paid place, visit the Concede Website and follow application instructions.

Image source



Just a minute by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Digital age learning

In my Learning is learning post yesterday, I started a debate about andragogy and pedagogy. I held the position that the theory of andragogy (Malcolm Knowles) adds very little to our understanding of learning. In some ways, I argued, andragogy theory seems outmoded in the light of recent rapid developments in new teaching methods, learning resources and digital media. Building on this position, I would like to examine two further concepts - namely heutagogy (Stewart Hase) and paragogy (Corneli and Danoff) - which may offer more appropriate ways of framing learning in the digital age. I would like to acknowledge Martin King, who set my thought processes going down this road when he commented on the 'Learning is learning' post. Although the two terms may be unfamiliar to some, most teachers will recognise how they actually work in authentic learning contexts. Heutagogy is a grand way of saying 'self directed or self determined learning'. Paragogy is another way of describing peer to peer learning, where students support each other's learning on an equal basis. Both are highly applicable when we consider the advance of learning technologies and the deep pervasion of social media into many learning spaces, formal and informal.

For me, paragogy is an extension of the concept of scaffolding (proposed by Jerome Bruner), where knowledgeable others (teachers or peers) can create optimal learning environments in which students can learn more than they would if they were studying on their own. Paragogy takes scaffolding farther though, because peers are in an equal relationship. The exchange conditions are duplex - that is, they work both ways and reciprocal learning is achieved as learners connect with each other, share their content and ideas, and engage in dialogue. If this sounds familiar, it is exactly what happens informally day in, day out on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites. Paragogy may also find more synergy than andragogy with emerging explanatory frameworks of digital age learning such as connectivism (Downes and Siemens).

Heutagogy by contrast - and in its loosest interpretation - might be conceived of as a form of flâneurism - the act of wandering described by Charles Baudelaire as a means to more fully experience the landscape or environment one finds oneself in. Many of us assume flâneur-like trajectories when we traverse our way across cyberspace, clicking through hyperlinks, sometimes happening by chance upon pages that interest us, and where serendipitous learning ultimately occurs. Heutagogic learning is essentially self directed and autodidactic, and at its most informal, may involve sense-making of the digital landscape by wandering seemingly aimlessly around it. But there is still a self-determined purpose underlying the actions of the learner. Scholars such as Hase and Kenyon have argued that a shift of emphasis from andragogy to self-determined learning would be beneficial because just like pedagogy, andragogy still holds connotations of teacher control (but see Donald Clark - USA - for an alternative perspective on this).

Image source by Steve Paine



Digital age learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Learning is learning

I got embroiled in a Twitter discussion today with Mark Childs and Fred Garnett on whether the word andragogy is actually helpful to our understanding of learning. I'm not convinced. As ever, I like to promote argument, so here on this blog, I offer you my own views on what is quite an old debate. For the uninitiated, Andragogy (from the Greek Andros, meaning man) was a term made popular in the education world by Malcolm Knowles. It refers to learning strategies and experiences that are for adults rather than children. Knowles had made the distinction between children's learning and adult learning on the basis of adult motivation for learning being different from that of children. Pedagogy, another term used widely in education, derives from the time of the Roman slaves, known as pedagogs, who were tasked to either train their masters' children, or in many cases, to 'lead them to education'. Pedagogy is sometimes erroneously applied only to children's education, but is best applied to all forms of teacher directed learning.

The main problem with Knowles's concept of andragogy is that it is intended to be different to pedagogy, which implies that adults learn differently to children. But is there any evidence for this? How does Knowles differentiate between adult and child learning? Here are his four main tenets for andragogy (in italics), accompanied by my own critical commentary:

1) Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction. This is problematic on several levels. Firstly, the term instruction implies that the teacher is directing the process of learning, which undermines the whole point of the autonomous learning andragogy is meant to epitomise. Secondly, should children not also be involved in the planning and evaluation of their 'instruction' or do they not have the same human rights as adults? Thirdly, if we believe that children don't really know what they need to learn, then we should concede that many adults don't either. However, taking this stance denies that many adults and children are actually much more astute at knowing what they need to learn than teachers give them credit for. Either way, this first distinction is meaningless.

2) Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities. Adults make mistakes and learn from them, but so do children. All we are talking about here is the length of time it takes to accumulate 'experience'. How much time on this planet does an individual need to accrue before they can in Knowles's terms be accepted as 'experienced'. If this is an indication of how adult learning differs from children's learning, it is tenuous indeed.

3) Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their job or personal life. This statement is actually more descriptive of the differences between compulsory and elective education than it is about any differences that may exist be between child and adult learning. True, many adults study disciplines to gain qualifications so they can either secure a career, or enhance their position within their present employment. When they leave scjool they have a choice what they wish to study. In school, children are still fed the 'just in case' curriculum, which not only wastes a great deal of contact teaching time, but also ultimately turns many young people off learning for good. Furthermore, although most children don't have jobs, they are constantly and informally acquiring knowledge and learning many skills that have immediate relevance to their personal lives. So what is the difference?

4) Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented. This is also more a commentary on the nature of state-funded schooling than it is on the nature of learning. Any learning can be supported through problem-centred methods regardless of whether it is adult or child oriented. I would even go farther to suggest that presenting any learner, whether adult or child, with a problem can deepen their understanding of concepts, content and context. In reality within the current western education systems, we find elements of problem based and content based learning in both adult and child contexts.

So does the concept of Andragogy add any value to our understanding of learning? For me, the answer is no.  Learning is learning. Does it really matter whether you are an adult or a child as you learn? Are different processes at work, or is Knowles unwittingly describing the differences between the environments within which adults and children learn? Am I right or am I missing something? Please feel free to enter the debate in the comments box below.

Image from Justin Chadwick's The First Grader


Learning is learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Reasons teachers don't blog

I'm a little overwhelmed by the response to my post yesterday entitled Seven reasons teachers should blog which as I write this, is racing toward 2000 views in just 24 hours. Thank you to all those who have taken the time to stop by and read it. It is turning out to be one of my most successful posts of the year, and not just because of the hit rate. It seems that many teachers are interested in blogging (or edublogging), but for various reasons are not yet in there, getting their hands dirty. Some of those commenting on yesterday's post added further reasons why teachers should blog. Currently we are now up to 10 reasons, and I'm sure there will be more added in the coming days. You are very welcome to add your own reasons there.

But I'm concerned about the reasons teachers don't blog. One of the reasons teachers don't blog is because of fear. Fear of posting something they think will be 'below standard' or 'missing the mark', and I would imagine that many fear their ideas and best practices being held up in the spotlight in public, on the web. Some teachers may fear what their bosses might say if they start blogging and say things that their institute might not agree with. Others simply cannot blog because their school is blocking access to certain tools and services on the web. Some complain that they don't have enough time to blog, and are tired when they get home from a hard day in the classroom. Some may think that they have nothing to say that would be of interest to other teachers. These are all valid reasons, but probably the most trenchant barrier to blogging is that many teachers still don't - or can't - see the incredible benefits blogging can offer to them, personally.

Think about it. Blogging is essentially an online diary that enables you to put down your ideas and return to them at any time. The blog can be private - for your eyes only. You only publish what you want to when you hit the Publish button. But sharing ideas and growing a personal learning network are becoming synonymous for many teachers. The advent of social media such as Twitter and Facebook is ensuring that teachers can quickly build contact lists and engage in conversation with their counterparts all over the world. I will stick my neck out and suggest that this kind of informal and free continuing professional development is making more inroads into better pedagogy than any single CPD programme could ever achieve. When teachers blog, they create content, commentary, arguments, resources, links and artefacts that are freely available on the web. In return they receive comments from colleagues that may include other useful resources. Combined, this dialogue creates a digital footprint of useful materials that other teachers can use, engage with, and reflect upon. Edublogging is creating a global discourse that transcends the physical constraints of time and space.

In my view, there are more reasons for teachers to blog than there are reasons against. There are more benefits and barriers. So I encourage you to take the plunge if you have not already done so, and get blogging. Barriers are only barriers if you can't get around them, and if there is a will, most barriers can be broken down. If you are a new teacher blogger I invite you to post your blog URL in the comments box below, and if you are a genuine edublogger, I will make sure it appears for all to see on this blog.

Image source by 2create


Reasons teachers don't blog by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Seven reasons teachers should blog

I have written extensively on what makes a good blogpost and why it is so powerful. From personal experience blogging is one of the most beneficial professional development activities I have ever engaged with. I learn more from blogging than I do from almost any other activity I participate in. Here are 7 good reasons why teachers should blog:

1) Blogging causes you to reflect. Donald Schon suggested that reflection on, in and through practice were vital components of any professional practice. Teachers naturally think back on what has happened in their classroom, and often wonder what they could have done better. Blogging can help with this process, enabling teachers to keep an ongoing personal record of their actions, decisions, though processes, successes and failures, and issues they have to deal with.

2) Blogging can crystalise your thinking. In the act of writing, said Daniel Chandler, we are written. As we write, we invest a part of ourselves into the medium. The provisionality of the medium makes blogging conducive to drafting and redrafting. The act of composing and recomposing ideas can enable abstract thoughts to become more concrete. Your ideas are now on the screen in front of you; they can be stored, retrieved and reconstructed as your ideas become clearer. You don't have to publish if you want to keep those thoughts private. Save them and come back to them later. The blog can act as a kind of mirror to show you what you are thinking. Sometimes we don't really know what we are thinking until we actually write it down in a physical format.

3) Blogging can open up new audiences. You can become a teacher within an infinitely larger classroom, and as you blog on subjects you think are interesting, you will discover that there are plenty of other education professionals 'out there' who are also interested. People who are interested will eventually find your blog and visit it regularly to see if they can learn something new from you.

4) Blogging can create personal momentum. Once you have started blogging, and you realise that you can actually do it, you will probably want to develop your skills further. Blogging can be time consuming, but the rewards are ultimately worth it. In my own experience, I find myself breaking out of inertia to create some forward movement in my thinking especially when I blog about 'edgy' topics that may be emotive, controversial, challenging. The more you blog, the better you become at writing for your audience, managing your arguments, defending your position, thinking critically.

5) Blogging can give you valuable feedback. As you gain feedback from your readership, you gain a sense of peer review, sometimes challenging and refuting your ideas (tricky to handle, but be open minded and you will learn a lot from constructive criticism) or affirming what you already believe to be true (some feedback from readers adds further value to your blogpost, and it's there for all to read). Affirmation of your own beliefs can be a powerful enabler for you as a professional practitioner.

6) Blogging can be creative. If you persist with blogging, you will discover that you develop new and creative ways to articulate what you want to say. As I write, I often search for alternative ways to express myself, and this can be through images, quotes, a retelling of old experiences through stories, videos, audio, or useful hyperlink to related web resources. You have many ways to convey your ideas, and you are simply limited to your own imagination. Try out new ways of communicating and take risks. Blogging is the platform that allows you to be creative.

7) Blogging can raise your game. Blogging is immediate. As soon as you press the Publish button, your ideas are on the web in front of a potential worldwide audience. Time and again I have heard from other teachers (and students) that they take much more care over grammatical construction, spelling and punctuation when they discover they have an audience.

Image source (edited)


Seven reasons teachers should blog by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Secrets of the bloggerhood

How do you drive people toward your blog, and how do you gain a regular readership for your website? Well, there are many opinions on how this can be done. I read a very interesting and thought provoking blogpost on popularity earlier today by Ankesh Kothari, who guest writes on the Problogger site under the title of The Secret to Blog Popularity.

Here is an abstract from the post:

Psychologist Antonius Cillessen of the University of Connecticut wondered how kids became popular. So he started researching social behaviors and peer relations of early adolescent kids in American schools. And he found something very interesting. He found that every school had a bunch of very friendly kids who are socially accepted and liked by everyone. But they are never considered popular.

The kids who are considered popular are often just as friendly as these universally liked kids, but with one difference. The popular kids draw a boundary around themselves, and exclude a few “outcasts” from their circle. Professor Antonius found that you can’t become popular unless you learn to exclude. He stumbled onto a truth that Chinese philosopher Confucius had described years earlier:

“Build small community and thousands will want to join.” – Confucius

It’s a truth high-end clubs have realized too. The harsher they are in excluding people from entering their premises, the more popular they get. Facebook grew when Friendster and other social sites didn’t. Why? because of their initial exclusivity—they only allowed folks with a .edu email address to sign up.

Ankesh Kothari goes on to argue that exclusivity is the key to blog success. Exclude some, and you will attract others in great numbers, he suggests. Kothari's post is interesting on a number of levels. Firstly, it is written from a commercial perspective, and subscribes to the philosophy that 'big is better.' This in itself is not a good start for many educators, who are more concerned about achieving success for their learners than they are about making money for themselves (who would become a teacher if they wanted to get rich?). But the post also challenges the belief that 'if you build it they will come' which a great number of would-be bloggers cling to when they launch out into the blogosphere for the first time. Katie Hafner recently repurposed a Winston Churchill line when she said: "Never have so many people written so much to be read by so few." Cynical, but probably true for so many who write, and write, and write .... and nobody reads. They give up after a while, and their blogposts hang there in cyberspace like abandoned and dilapidated gas-stations in the desert. Most bloggers do not write because they want to achieve commercial success, but simply to share their ideas. If no-one reads these ideas though, it's a little like whistling into the wind. The article does however provides a clear insight into what drives crowds to certain sites and why they avoid certain other sites.

Secondly, the article is interesting because it highlights the power of content. Content is king, it has been said, but in this instance, Kothari is arguing that it is what you don't include as content that is just as powerful. He is not arguing only that you should exclude certain individuals from your blog (in this case beginners and those who are techno-nomads) but also that you exclude certain content. I can subscribe to the latter, but I find it hard to agree to the idea that we should deliberately exclude certain individuals from reading our blogs. It runs against the ethos of just about everything I value in good teaching. Yet I can concede the point that perhaps this kind of weeding out of readership will happen naturally. My own blog for example attracts mainly teachers, trainers and learning technologists in its readership. I wouldn't expect lawyers or bankers to be reading it too much, because the content is irrelevant to many of them.

Finally, the article is interesting because it is a guest blog post. Kothari may be hung up on exclusivity, and motivated by commercial success but he doesn't seem to mind spreading the love a little by sharing his ideas for free as guest posts on other blogs. He does this because he knows that he will gain a larger audience for his ideas and that what he gives away will be returned to him with interest:

The first thing I did when I started out was to focus on who my ideal readers would be. I zeroed in on people who would take action without making excuses, and who have achieved some success already and are hungry for more. I know that if I can help my readers’ blogs grow, my site will grow automatically. And so I only wanted to focus on readers who are willing and able to put in the work to take action and grow their blogs.

What Kothari does not mention however, is the style and the format in which blogs can be presented. I consider this to be fundamental to the success of good blogging. Find a formula that works and stick to it. You need an aesthetic and conducive setting for your content. You have sweated over it, so it deserves to be presented in the best possible way. This can only be done by trial and error, but ultimately, you have to be able to say something important if you are to draw your readership back time and time again to your blog. There are other factors not mentioned, such as the ability to come up with bite sized blogposts (long tomes can turn people off unless the content is earth shattering) and also snappy titles that attract readers when they see them, for example on Twitter.

Ultimately Kothari is correct when he says that we cannot serve everyone. I am uncomfortable with the exclusivity tag, but can see his point that content must be targeted to those who will benefit best from it. Kothari's post is a very revealing and thought provoking blogpost on all these levels, but most of all it is interesting because it epitomises what blogging is all about, and the underlying processes that make it what Lawrence Lessig calls: "The most important form of unchoreographed public discourse we have."

Image source by Geek and Poke


Secrets of the bloggerhood by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Creative destruction

Anyone who has tried the Towers of Hanoi puzzle will know that it looks simple, but can be extremely complex to complete within the minimum number of moves. It drives some people mad. You can try it online here, but which ever way you do the puzzle it takes time and patience. It's not so much the amount of moves needed to complete the puzzle. It is the counter-intuition that often baffles. To complete the Towers of Hanoi problem, you must first build and then destroy what you have built to reach your target.

Using wikis for collaborative writing is a little like solving the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. When two or more people work on the same wiki page, there is often a lot of deletion, modification and overwriting - a kind of destructive creativity - that goes on as the content is refined and polished. From my recent research I found that many students don't like the idea of their content being deleted or modified. They feel a sense of ownership for what they have created. Some of them want sole credit. Or it is simply too strange for them to accept. And yet wikis, as community spaces, are by their nature, a 'free for all'. The polishing and refining process is something that students do all the time when they are completing an essay. So why do they falter when faced with community editing? Perhaps they feel they have lost some control. Or perhaps it seems illogical to delete content to make it better. Similarly to the Towers of Hanoi, content management on a wiki can appear to be counter intuitive - but to create, sometimes you must first destroy. To build you may need to dismantle first.


Image source by Kenjiys


creative destruction by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.