This year, Prof Michael Sandal is providing us with a series of lectures he has entitled, “A New Citizenship”. I have listed to the first two with some interest.
His first one is around Markets and Morals and in his second lecture, he discusses Morality in Politics and raises a number of key issues, some of which had synergies for me, yet at the same time held a contradiction. Most of what Sandal had to argue, came down to the basic premise of ‘purpose’. At times where conflict of opinions arise, if the issue can be stripped down to the basic principles of purpose, then a logical way forward can be found. The basis of this argument can be found in Aristotle’s work.
The idea of purpose as being a central component of what we do is no truer than in online learning communities. The very first part of forming such a community, is to define the purpose – what is it the participants wish to do. It is from here that all else follows – and sometimes that means not adopting an online community of learning at all.
However the contradiction came from a question he was asked regarding the use of the internet in helping to move political debate. He suggested that although it provided a route for communication, it could not replace direct personal engagement. This is where he and I would part company – and it seems as I am not alone as Timonthy Garton Ash describes how the, ‘Digital David fights theocratic Goliath” in response to the current non violent reactions which are taking place in Iran, in today’s Guardian.
My experience of working in cutting edge projects over the last 10 years has demonstrated to me that it’s not only possibly to directly engage on a personal level, but that sometimes this engagement can go very deep. Comments such as, “The xxxx needs to fashion a real dialogue with heads and leadership teams. The questions are excellent – probing and full of energy and ideas” and “I really felt that my views were important and that the subsequent changes in policy had arisen after much consultation with a wide range of people…” have not come from people who work alongside each other, but from people who have never met and are engaging in a virtual world to move, in their context, the education debate forward.
Tags: Innovation · Reflection
I spent Monday evening and most of Tuesday at Brunel University with a group of colleagues from schools, HE, DCFS, GTCE and a variety of other educational organizations, looking at Web 2.0 tools and discussing them in the the context of teacher professional development. I offer this posting as a summary for those on the day who wanted to have something tangible to walk away with and for anyone else swinging by who might be interested.
I had been asked to present on Moderation (in 5 minutes max!) - a term which does not work for me in the context of Web 2.0 and online learning environments. Why? Well for me terms like coach, mentor, moderator, tutor, teacher all give an underpinning philosophy of heirarchy and control. For me the word that works best, is Facilitator and in the context of this environment, ‘Online Facilitator’. Why? Because for me this term is more about empowerment and enablement. It comes from a premise of non heirarchical control. The online facilitator is not necessarily the expert and is just as likely to be learning along side that of the participants using Web 2.0 online environments.
My 5 minute presentation diagram!
I went on to discuss key facets of online learning environments, which can be losely grouped under several headings - from Pariticipation to Tools to Environment to Success. Themes running through all of these areas are Time (or Attention), Negotiation, Purpose and Motivation. The 5 minute presentation was based on a paper I presented at the Virtual Communities Conference in the Hague back in 2004. Most of what I introduced to the group, for some I’m sure it was not new, is covered in our course Online Facilitation, which we host via our Know How website. For more details, please take a look or contact me directly.
You might also be interested in seeing my other CORE Education colleagues presentations here:
Malcolm Moss - A Unified Model for Teacher Centred Professional Teaching and Learning Development
Richard Millwood - How Should We Conceptualize CPD?
Tags: Learning Technologists · Life Long Learning · Online Facilitation · Professional Development
I was catching up with the Times Higher Education Supplement this morning and came across an article, I think by Gloria Monday on “Plagiarism: an inconvenient truth”. Sure Plagiarism is an issue, one that all of those involved with marking - be that university level or otherwise - have probably come across at some time or another. But in the lead up to the key discussion regarding this topic, the author wrote:
“There’s also the odd gleeful moment when you discover that you can fail someone outright for having understood nothing.”
which I was appauled at. Is this really what people think when they have to fail someone? I am aghast that a) someone should think this and b) they think it’s something that they would like to share with others. Surely the failure lies with us as facilitators of learning, educators or teachers if a learner has understood nothing by the time they come to ‘hand in’ work. It would be great to hear what others think about this … and/or the age old problem of plagiarism.
Tags: Assessment
I was interested to read THIS ARTICLE yesterday in the New York Times and it got me thinking about how important ULTRAVERSITY … otherwise known as the BA in Learning, Technology and Research Degree … is in providing an affordable option for further study in this time of economic downturn. I decided to take a look at costs in the UK and found on the Funding Education website, this statement regarding tuition fees,
“Universities can now set their own tuition fee rates for full-time home students, up to a fixed amount set by the government. The maximum amount they can currently charge is £3,145 a year. Most universities tend to charge the full rate.”
It is this last sentence that makes me think that with Ultraversity, we may not be hit as hard as some. Our degree has just gone up by £50 to £1850, for this coming September … kept so low largely due to the online nature of the course. Not only that, due to the nature of the study our learners do not incur the typical £10,000 debt that many face to face undergraduate learners tend to be landed with after completing their degree - so it has to be a good choice for those considering higher education courses.
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This weekend just gone, I was working down at Brunel University at an event organized by Prof Mariyln Leask, MirandaNet and funded by Becta. The aim of the weekend was to draft up an advisory paper on ICT Tools for Future Teachers and about 30 of us gathered from the Primary, Secondary, FE and HE sectors to share our thoughts and ideas regarding this topic. More than that I cannot say at this stage as the paper is still being drafted, however I wanted to share one interesting moment from the start of the weekend.
One of the first things we did was to share a ‘Eureka’ and a ‘non Eureka’ moment regarding our experiences with ICT. They were far ranging and sometimes very personal accounts of enlightening moments from the past concerning people’s relationship with technology.
It would be great to learn of others people’s moments, so if you have time, please share yours here.
Tags: Learning Technologists · Reflection
I came across this slide show a few months back and then misplaced the url, but someone was kind enough to reacquaint me with it a few days ago. It is called Shift Happens, the contents of which are based on a presentation given by Karl Fisch. It is rather long, but very interesting if you have the time to go through all 67 slides.
In particular there are a couple that stand out for me and have direct implications on the way we plan the future of educational opportunities for the future world. They are as follows:
“We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies that haven’t been invented in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.”
“There are over 2.7 billion searches performed on google each month. To whom were these questions addressed before google?”
“The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years. For students starting a four year technical or college degree, this means that half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.”
We are already working towards some of the challenges posed by these statements. Think of the Ultraversity degree that I am involved with or the IDIBL work in which my colleague Richard is engaged. But there is so much more we need to get our heads around if we are going to be able to provide meaningful ways of developing our current and future learners. At CORE Education, this is what we are currently engaged upon, and have been since the days when we were all still at Ultralab. The development of tools on their own, however are nothing if not underpinned by the development of relevant processes, which in turn need a philosophy, which will support the dynamic environment we now find ourselves in. And it is this emerging philosophy, which interests me and is one of the areas I am exploring in my PhD.
Tags: Life Long Learning · Professional Development
The IDeA (Improvement and Development Agency) has just won an e-Government National Award for excellence in professionalism and leadership. The award was achieved by the Knowledge Management team, who CORE Education UK has been mentoring and working alongside for the past 2 years. The development and implementation of their Communities of Practice platform, which was nominated for the award, was originally instigated by Marliyn Leask, now Professor of Education at Brunel University.
Photo courtesy of "Image2Photography"
In commending the Knowledge Management team for their hard work she said of us at CORE Education UK,
“I am particularly grateful to the ongoing advice, support and challenge from Richard Millwood and Sarah Jones from Core Education to get this side of the operation up and running … Core Education developed from Ultralab (which advised the incoming govt. in1997 on ICT in schools strategy). I first met Richard Millwood at Ultralab in 1995 on the TeacherNet project and Ultralab staff worked with Oracle to develop Think.com now ThinkQuest which is an online community across the international education sector and which provided the foundation for the NCSL national online community service for senior staff in the schools sector. So the long experience of Richard and Sarah was invaluable.”
Tags: Innovation · Life Long Learning
Last October I spent two weeks in Christchurch, New Zealand at the ULearn08 Conference hosted by CORE Education NZ. It was a fabulous occasion, where my colleagues and I from CORE Education UK got to know the New Zealand team, strengthening our professional and organisational bonds as well as presenting our current thinking at the countries main Educational Conference. Whilst there, Nick Billows got myself and Richard to appear on their EdTalks vidcasts (a growing collection of videos featuring New Zealand and International educators talking about learning) and below you can watch me whittering on about “Life Long Learning: The acquisition of prcess tools”.
Tags: Life Long Learning
Hi there and welcome to my third attempt at a blog. This site is under development, since the recent upgrade deleted all the previous content and discussions … thank goodness I kept copies of everything. Don’t you just love technology! :o) Please say hi if you make it this far!
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