Three things

There are three things we need to know about learning for this generation. The first is that learning needs to be personalised. As I argued in a previous post, learning must be differentiated, because one size does not fit all, and standardised curricula and testing are not fit for purpose in the 21st Century. Personal learning is unique to each learner. The tools and devices students choose, and the pathways they decide to take are in many ways beginning to challenge the synchronised and homogenised approaches we still practice in schools, universities and organisations.

Secondly, learning needs to be social. Much of what we learn comes from contact and communication with others. Increasingly, such contact and communication is mediated through technology, and social media tools are ideal for this purpose. The celebrated Russian psychologist Lev Vygotskii proposed the idea of learning being extended when children are mentored by a knowledgeable other person. His Zone of Proximal Development theory has been central to our understanding of how we learn in social contexts. Yet in recent years, with the proliferation and equalisation of knowledge and the strengthening of social connections through digital media, new theories such as connectivism and paragogy have emerged to challenge the central place of ZPD in contemporary pedagogical theory. We need to ask whether we now need knowledgeable others such as subject experts to help us extend our learning when we have all knowledge at our fingertips. Now many learners are exploiting the power of social media to build and engage with equals in personal learning networks.

Thirdly, learning needs to be globalised. As we develop personal expertise, and begin to practice it in applied contexts, we need to connect with global communities. Students who share their content online can reach a worldwide audience who can act as a peer network to provide constructive feedback. Teachers can crowd-source their ideas and share their content in professional forums and global learning collectives, or harness the power of social media to access thought leaders in their particular field of expertise. Scholars who are not connected into the global community are increasingly isolated and will in time be left behind as the world of education advances ever onward.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


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

Tools of the trade

I was quite impressed by Joyce Seitzinger's Professional Learning Environment (PLN) model that she presented at Deakin University in Melbourne this week. The first slide on the left shows a quadrant model in which she has used a work/office metaphor to define four discrete functions of a PLN. The first, the Staffroom is quite public, calling on high levels of communication and high profile, and involves the use of microblogging tools such as Twitter. This will work provided the user subscribes to a requisite number of other relevant user accounts, and can share their ideas and converse freely. It will fail if the user does not follow or is not followed by enough other subscribers to enable the benefits of the network effect.

Joyce calls the second quadrant the Filing Cabinet, because essentially, it is low profile and low in terms of the efforts put into communicating with others, and it provides a repository for the user (and their PLN) to store, categorise and possibly share content they think is important to them. Social tagging sites such as Diigo and Delicious can offer this kind of filing cabinet organisation, but so too can wikis and other collaborative tools, which would I imagine, raise the level of engagement and profiling of individuals who organised and shared their content in this manner.

The third quadrant is the Newspaper, which again Joyce sees as low profile and low in terms of communication. I assume that this is because most of the tools she identifies as falling into this category of PLN deployment is push technology (RSS feeds, Google Reader etc). I would imagine that if Joyce placed blogs into this category, (and in the model's present form I see no reason why they shouldn't be there), then a higher profile and higher level of engagement between user and PLN would ensue.

Yet she leaves blogs and other authoring tools to insert into the final quadrant, the Portfolio. This is the quadrant in which a lot of high profile activity is conducted, but I would argue that it is also high in engagement. The question still open to me is whether this model would change from it's current form to represent Personal Learning Networks. Or is there any real difference between these and Professional Learning Networks?

It is worth noting that only the first quadrant of this PLN model is actually performed synchronously, that is, in real time. That may give some a clue as to the latent potential of tools such as Twitter to connect people powerfully and instantly across the globe and to give all of us access to a worldwide network of experts and enthusiasts in any subject for which we have an interest. Everyone should have a PLN, because in today's connected world, without it you are not fully equipped as a professional.

Images courtesy of Joyce Seitzinger


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

A thousand conversations

I was labelled a 'radical' yesterday by one of my colleagues. Well, bless. I hadn't thought about myself in those terms before, because what I do is instinctive and what I write about seems to be absolutely normal to me. But standing back from me and trying to look in from the outside, I suppose some might think I was slightly out of left field, or that some of my ideas were idealistic. Whatever.

What I would like to know is, what does 'radical' actually mean in the context of education? A post on my blog last year, entitled Outrageous Alternatives outlined a brief history of what are considered to be radical approaches to schooling. Others have also written recently about radical ideas about how to effect the transformation of education many of us wish to see.

If you're into 'radical' thought, one set of resources I can highly recommend is by Beth Davies-Stofka. She curates an excellent Scoop.it site called Radical Education which is crammed full of great blog posts written to get us all thinking about how we can transform education and create more effective learning environments. In a post on digital storytelling, Aleks Krotoski writes:

"Human experience is a series of never-ending, overlapping stories bumping into one another in expected and unexpected ways. Our days are made up of personal narratives of good and evil, joy and conflict, magic potions and angry gnomes."

I can subscribe to this. The magic potion in this part of the world would be cider of course. Even the angry gnomes part can be a little too close to the truth, in this neck of the woods. Krotoski goes on to elaborate about why storytelling is so important:

"They are naturally co-creations based on a push and pull of projection and interpretation. We interpret, analyse and synthesise the characters and events in our lives to help us make sense of the world, and these have been translated by professionals into folk tales, myths, legends, pantomime, bestsellers, soap operas and Hollywood blockbusters. Storytellers are simply curators of information who finesse the elements of a yarn into a beginning, middle and end."

Story telling is important to all of us. It goes beyond a mere collection of events. We tell the story of our lives when we meet. We make sense of the world around us as we relate our histories. We establish norms and decide what is important for our community. Krotoski again: "Stories are memory aids, instruction manuals and moral compasses. When enlisted by charismatic leaders and turned into manifestos, dogmas and social policy, they've been the foundations for religions and political systems. When a storyteller has held an audience captive around a campfire, a cinema screen or on the page of a bestseller, they've reinforced local and universal norms about where we've been and where we're going. And when they've been shared in the corner shop, at the pub or over dinner they've helped us define who we are and how we fit in."

In short, story telling can be very powerful. It's powerful because it is a route through to making sense of our worlds - one of our prime motivators in life. It is our common search for the tacit knowledge that will enable us to survive. If something doesn't make sense, or if there is a clash of principles in our heads (cognitive dissonance), we go all out to try to resolve the conflict. That is how tacit learning happens. According to Thomas and Seely-Brown (2011), you can't teach tacit knowledge. Unlike explicit knowledge, which is peddled every day in our schools in the form of lessons full of facts, this deeper 'tacit' knowldge has to be experienced personally by each individual before it becomes theirs to own and to use. Storytelling takes each participant on a personal journey through a sometimes bewildering landscape of opportunities to acquire this kind of learning.

Digital storytelling can take our personal narratives up to a new plane of experience. The tools available to us today enable us to take companions on our journey through this terrain. We can co-create content, tell the story to each other regardless of location, and rework it so that it has common meaning and purpose. Our stories can be told time and time again, each time differently, with each version taking on a greater richness than its predecessor.

Is digital storytelling a radical departure from traditional education practices? I don't think so. We have been telling each other stories since the day we could string a sentence together. Children tell jokes in the playground. They write essays about what they did during their holidays. Children read Harry Potter and watch Eastenders on evening TV. It's something they are habituated into. Yet there is something new in the way our own stories can be generated, shared, repurposed and retold. The digital tools we now have at our disposal enable what Rose (2010) calls "multi-way conversation." For Rose, storytelling has reached a new pitch, has opened up space into a new social dimension: "It's very different when you have a medium that forces you to engage with other people," he says. "You don't know if you're going to have to tell a story for one hour, two hours or 10 years."

Telling your story is an age-old cultural practice. Digital storytelling takes it to another level, involving global conversations, multiple versions, and a cast of thousands. The radical part is where our understanding of the world around us can be transformed through these conversations. You don't need school for that.

References
Rose, F. (2010) The Art of Immersion: How the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the way we tell stories. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.
Thomas, D. and Seely-Brown, J (2011) A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. USA: Create Space.

Image source


A thousand conversations by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

No more funnels

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the personalisation of education. The sticking point is that most education is publicly funded, the state has a major stake in how it's conducted, and therefore dictates what should be taught in schools. Because of lack of space, time and resources (you will always have this problem when the state intervenes) there is little latitude for personalised approaches and creativity is stifled. Every child gets the same content, and every child is tested in the same, standardised way. The result: children become disenfranchised and demotivated, teachers are exhausted and demoralised, schools are positioned unfairly in league tables, and governments measure success not through human achievement or creativity, but through cold, hard statistics. This is universal education, and if one size does not fit all ... tough. Shame no-one has told the powers that be that universal education is unachievable.

Ivan Illich railed against this mindset way back in 1970 in his anarchical, visionary critique of the school system. In Deschooling Society, Illich called for personal learning through informal learning networks, and rejected the funnelling approach of mass, unidirectional, instructivist education systems. More recently, powerful modern day visionaries such as Stephen Heppell and Sir Ken Robinson are saying the same thing. They ask how we can sustain a factory model of education 'production', where children are 'batch processed' according to their age groups. It's obvious to any teacher or parent that children develop at different rates, and all have different talents and interests. I suppose we have Jean Piaget and his fellow 'stage theory' psychologists to thank for that kind of constrained thinking.

In their current configuration, says Robinson, most schools kill creativity. The picture above was taken in 1909. If those students could jump into a time machine and be transported a century or so forward to 2011, what would they be amazed by? Jumbo jets, motorways? Satellites and HD television? The internet, medical science? Mobile phones and credit cards? They wouldn't recognise any of those. One thing they would almost certainly recognise though, would be the school classroom. It has been largely bypassed by the last century of progress, because institutions are very hard to change.

Heppell points out that creativity could be encouraged and personal learning achieved through the use of handheld technologies such as mobile phones. When they use these tools, he says, children are in their element. When they walk into the classroom, they are told to switch off all devices, and in doing so, the school switches off the child too. Gaming consoles could also be used to personalise learning, engaging children in playful learning, something which Heppell strongly advocates. But ultimately, teachers have a vast array of personal learning resources at their disposal thanks to the social web. Students must choose their own personal tools - if they have tools imposed upon them there is little scope for personalisation. Schools are now beginning to incorporate some social media into their lessons and even allowing children to use mobile and handheld technologies during lessons. It's starting, but it's slow progress. If students are shown a range of tools and then allowed to choose which ones they would like to use, if they are allowed to create their own personal webs and choose their own connections, we might begin to see some very personal learning taking place in our schools.


No more funnels by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Fair measures

Many forms of assessment have been tried in schools. The current UK secondary curriculum is based on a combination of summative (exams) and continuous (project based) forms of assessment, and is thought to be fair because it measures learner performance over a long period of time. And yet this approach to assessment is flawed. It's flawed because it is based on a criterion referenced system which expects all children within a given subject area (and usually within the same age group) to perfom at a previously defined level of cognitive performance. It is a standardised testing system which is applied to learning - something that can never be 'standard'. It is fairer than an exam only based assessment where a pass or a fail may depend on the health or emotional state of the student at the time of the test. It is also fairer than norm referenced testing, which pits students against each other. But it is still unfair for students who may not have the ability to perform at the expected criterion level. Many students subsequently fail and are stigmatised as a result of criterion referenced assessment. But it's the best we have, I hear some of you say. Well, if that's true, then we're in real trouble.

There's an alternative. A fairer, and more personalised form of assessment is ipsative assessment. This is where learners are measured against their own previous performances. Ipsative forms of assessment have been successfully used for children with special educational needs. It measures individual progress. It is also a form of informal measurement of skill for children who compete against themselves in video games or in sports to guage physical skills. There is no motivation better than competing against yourself. If you fail, no-one is able to pass judgement on you but yourself. If you succeed, that's the spur to push yourself onwards to gain even better skills or higher levels of knowledge.

How would ipsative assessment work in formal classroom settings? Well, there are already some hybid versions of ipsative assessment being practiced by some schools. For example, Assessing Pupil Progress (APP) is a means of measuring a learning over a period of time using students' own previous attainment scores and mapping them against their current ones. APP is good for tracking progress of individuals over time and it also helps teachers to diagnose a pupil's learning issues and deficits early and to make intervention as required. But how about letting students set their own criteria for assessment? How about some kind of negotiation with the teacher about what should be learnt and how it should be measured? Wouldn't this be more personal? Radical perhaps, and possibly more time consuming, but it's more personal too, and if it improves learning, wouldn't it be worth the extra effort?

Image source


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

House of cards

Our first keynote speaker this morning had a very appropriate title for his talk, given the unseasonable wet weather we've been experiencing here in Brisbane. In 'Bringing the Cloud down to Earth' Nick Carr - author of The Shallows, and controversially, an article entitled "Is Google making us stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains.''- raised a number of issues about technological change and agency, and tracked the history of similar innovations through history. Ironically, one of his illustrations was a picture of one of Google's data centres. Carr's declaration that Cloud computing is the most important innovation since personal computing was not challenged. 'PCs put the power of computing on your desk' he said, 'and cloud computing has put the power of a data centre in your hand'. And it's true. Businesses are in the process of seceding their data and computing resources to the care of centralised, remote services, in much the same way businesses did with their energy needs when the first big centralised power stations began to draw in their customers. By implication, education is also in the throes of surrendering its content and connections to the Cloud. Carr discussed the risks and the benefits. He convinced most of us that the benefits outweighed the risks. If we are in the mind set iof lease, buy and manage, he said, then working remains fragmented. As a disruptive technology, he promised, the Cloud will easily outstrip any previous technology and quickly take its place. Fragmented working has had it's day, and the Cloud is replacing it as companies and institutes outsource all their computing power. The Cloud is here to stay, and as Bruce Hornsby put it, 'that's just the way it is'.

The second keynote of the day came from Sir John Daniel, whom I had bumped into as he emerged, slightly confused, from the lift earlier in the day. He smiled when he recognised me, and after a few pleasantries, then asked if he was on the correct floor for the convention centre. I showed him the way, and then, in his keynote, he reciprocated by showing all of us the way. In a brilliant, erudite and critical evaluation of a number of school computer projects, he posed the question; 'Computers for Secondary School Children: A busted flush?' Daniel pointed out in his opening gambit that around 400 million children between the ages of 11-17 years have never been to secondary school, and don;t stand a chance of ever doing so. Primary school is the only mandatory schooling for many emerging nations. When secondary specialities need to be taught, they are often found to be too expensive for the state funds of most poor countries, so children past the age of 11 don't get the opportunity unless their parents can pay.

But, he asked, do initiatives aimed at trying to provide computers for such children to offer escape routes from this poverty trap actually help? Well, yes and no, was Sir John's answer. No, in the case of Nick Negroponte's One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project, which was aimed at an ambitious 150 million, only 1 million have actually been distributed. Yes, in the case of 'Slum Dog Professor' Sugata Mitra's hole in the wall project. The difference between the them, said Sir John, lay in the concept and theory behind the two projects. OLPC was premised on the theory of constructivism, where the child, as a solo explorer, could use his laptop to learn independently. Mitra's project on the other hand, discovered that children actually learn best (and even teach themselves) when they are in small groups. Minimally invasive education has been shown to be better than direct instruction for promoting intellectual maturity. Thus, said Sir John, social connectivism trumps constructivism for third world child learning. Oh, and by the way a busted flush is not a leaky toilet - in a card game it's a seemingly good thing which fails to reach its full potential.

More reporting from the World Computer Congress tomorrow.

Image source

House of cards by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Down under, over and out

Well, here I am, downunder in Brisbane - in the so-called sunshine state of Australia, soaking up ... the rain. Just like England in the Spring then. I feel very at home here, because Brisbane has been suffering record downfalls of rain in the last two days, but it looks like easing off and returning to normal by the end of the week.

I'm here in the Gold Coast of Australia to participate in the IFIP World Computer Congress, which is being held in the Convention Centre. It's a four day event and as usual, attracts delegates from every corner of the world. Most are IT professionals of one kind or another, software engineers, computer scientists, hardware specialists and our lot - the experts in pedagogy. Technical Committee 3 or TC3 of IFIP is the education committee, and it has several sub committees or working groups (with me so far?). I'm the chair of IFIP WG 3.6 (Distance Education) which boasts around 80 members worldwide.

The Learn IT strand of the conference - Key Competencies of the Knowledge Society (hashtag is #kcks2010) - is running for 4 days parallel to the rest of the event, which in total has about 16 parallel streams of conferences. It's massive. The convention hall itself is immense and as I sit here writing this, I can see about 100 metres in each direction - that's just the mezzanine foyer. The main one downstairs is even larger.

Today we are in Day 2 of the event, and I'm looking forward to a keynote speech from the former Vice Chancellor of the Open University, Sir John Daniel, whom I bumped into in May down in Windhoek, Namibia. He will be speaking about computers for secondary school children, and there will be a discussion panel following, with the title: 'Personalisation of learning - are we there yet?' I'm intrigued to know what they will discuss and decide...

Yesterday went by in a bit of a jet lagged fog to be honest with you. I met several people I know and some I had only met before on Twitter, including Carol Skyring and Steve Hargardon, and had some interesting chats. One of the best moments was listening to one of my Glaswegian colleague speaking in fluent Portuguese to a Brazillian delegate. Whilst eating meat pies. Respect. I managed to keep awake long enough to give my own 2 papers in #kcks2010 at 16.00 local time (having essentially gone without any decent sleep for 48 hours) and people said I presented with a sharp focus and without any signs of tiredness. That's adrenaline for you. Either that, or the audience was also jetlagged. Today, after a splendid breakfast at the Rydges Hotel, connected to the conventional hall, I feel a lot more human and ready to face the day ahead. I will blog more from the event as things unfold.

Image source

Down under, over and out by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Physiology of a PLE

Yesterday I posted my views on what I think are the essential components of a Personal Learning Environment - the Anatomy of the PLE. Today, I want to examine some of the functionality of PLEs - the physiology if you will - what is it that learners need from their PLEs? The slide to the left represents the three main functionalities I believe are the most important functions learners need for lifelong learning in a digital age. You will note that the functionality is exclusive to the personal web tools (PWTs) I outlined in yesterday's post. However, given that the context of the PLE is much wider than the web tools a student uses, it is possible to apply creation, organisation and sharing of content to a wider range of practices including analogue content, such as newspapers and magazines, realia (visits, real experiences, encounters, conversations) and other non-digital materials. Whether these remain analogue, or are in someway captured in digital format remains the choice of each indivdual lifelong learner.

There are other functionalities of course, but I believe that the essence of the physiology of most PLEs is represented in the diagram presented here. A fourth component, communication - which includes sharing, discussion and dialogue in both synchronous and asynchronous modes, can be represented as an overarching circle within the Venn diagram.

Such key functions of the PLE (Personal Web Tools component) can be managed through a number of tools, and learners each have their individual preferences, all of which ensures that each PLE will be unique to that individual learner. Some of these tools are represented here in the second figure, but these are by no means exhaustive, and of course, many are interchangable for different tasks and purposes. Note that the e-portfolio sits across all functionalities, and is the most likely tool to be provided by the institution. There is plenty more I could say but I will leave that for another blog post. I hope that these concept maps provide a more detailed set of ideas which provide a clearer view of how and why PLEs can be created, developed, managed and used by learners.

Physiology of a PLE by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Anatomy of a PLE

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) do exactly what they say on the can - they are personal to each individual, created by them, owned by them, used by them within their lifelong learning. Originally a counterpoint to the institutional Managed Learning Environment (iMLE or 'VLE'), PLEs are becoming a much talked about concept, and were the prime focus of the recently held PLE Conference in Cornella, Barcelona. Delegates at the conference could not agree whether PLEs should remain the sole domain of the learner, or whether in some way they could be incorporated into institutional infrastructures. Some argued strongly for sole student ownership, vehemently opposed to any institutional meddling in a personal learning environment. Others held the position that PLEs should have some insitutional provision incorporated within them. Still others thought that PLEs should be part of the institutional infrastructure, brought within the protective envelope of the university fire wall. Many located themselves in middle ground positions. My personal view is that students own and create their PLE but that the iMLE also has something to offer them, even though it is highly problematic in its current form. I am arguing that many students tend to avoid using the iMLE because they either find it difficult to use, or irrelevant to their daily learning needs. It is a clash of concepts, no bridge seems possible, and the problem appears to be intractable.

I have been working with Manish Malik (University of Portsmouth) for some time now to try to reconceptualise PLEs, so that they are locatable within both informal and formal learning contexts. At the Barcelona PLE Conference we unveiled our ideas in a position paper, which we also share here on this blog. In previous posts I have argued provocatively that institutional VLEs present a number of problems for individual learners, not least the walled garden effect, which presents a great barrier to student freedom and creativity. I have played devil's advocate, role playing at high profile events to promote debate, engaging fruitfully with many knowledgeable peers, and in the process I have had some great fun. Now it's time to change direction a little and challenge the unhelpful binary of PLE versus VLE.

Firstly, we need to understand the true nature of the PLE - its anatomy. What does a PLE look like? What are its essential components? How does it differ from institutionally provided systems? Is there any common ground, and if so, how can this be harnessed? All these questions and more are yet to be answered, but in our view, the PLE is wider than the Web tools students use to create, find, organise and share content. It is also wider than the Personal Learning Network (PLN) of people and content that each of us generates when we learn informally or in formal contexts. This is represented in the first slide above.

In this representation of the PLE, we try take a more consiliatory perspective beyond the unhelpful binary discourse of 'PLE vs VLE'. We propose a hybrid approach. Essentially, we argue that students require structure and scaffolding when they first venture into digital learning environments. No-one is a digital native, no matter how much the Prensky theory is talked up. Yet the average institutional Managed Learning Environment is by nature dull, uninspiring and difficult to navigate. Web 2.0 tools (Cloud Learning Environment) are more attractive, easier to use and free, but are unprotected and vulnerable. Further, the content sent to the application ends up becoming the 'property' of the Internet company and is difficult to delete, a target for data mining. Whilst CLEs will not fully address all of the tensions between iMLEs and PLEs, we argue that they provide a tentative bridge to provide the best of both worlds in terms of affordances and interoperability. We would be very interested to hear your views on this proposal. Tomorrow: Physiology of a PLE

Related posts

Response to Anatomy of a PLE: Mark Smithers

The Dichotomies in Personal Learning Environments: Ismael Pena-Lopez

Mapping the PLE Sphere: Ismael Pena-Lopez

The ILE and FLE in Harmony: Ryan Tracey

Anatomy of a PLE by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.