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CC Image - Maistora Att-NC-ND

On Monday 24th May, it was announced that BECTA is to close; the main victim of the bonfire of the education quangoes. It has elicited a huge range of responses in the community from the hand-wringing to the vindictive. My interest in it all is that my former colleagues working in CLC’s round the country will be affected as BECTA had provided capital funding for many of them for the last 2 years. What happens now for CLC’s remains to be seen.

There have been many great posts on the closure from some bloggers that I really respect,  so I wanted to devote some space in my own blog to collating a few of them. If you think there are others I should include please let me know.

Tony Sheppard

Steve Wheeler

Graham Attwell

Miles Berry

NAACE (Mark Chambers)

Rory Cellan-Jones

Thinq

John McClear

Heutagogic Archive

Dan Roberts

Glyn Moody (ComputerWorld)

Image: Luke Cantrell Att-NC-ND

I’m extremely grateful to Nick Shackleton-Jones, the BBC’s Manager of Online and Informal Learning, for letting me share this with you verbatim.

I was trying to write a post about personal styles having undertaken a Myers Briggs Type Indicator questionnaire as part of a team exercise. It was principally about questions of identity, learning, social interaction and having a strong preference for introversion, but could never quite nail what I wanted to say…

…so I gave up.

Instead, here’s Nick’s very personal, articulate take on a similar theme. I wanted to post it here because it’s a really interesting insight into someone whose natural style is to keep things hidden. I’m naturally quite reticent, finding it hard to express what I’m thinking and why I’m thinking it so I found Nick’s candour very surprising and refreshing.

Originally posted on his blog, he’s allowed me to present it here as a guest post. I don’t recognise all the aspects he’s talking about in myself but there are things that I relate to very closely.

I should clarify, I’m not posting this as a claim that I have Asperger’s. I just thought it was a great piece of writing.

Read to the end; it’s not merely an apologia.

Please have a look at his fascinating blog on learning, Aconventional, and follow him on Twitter.

“We are not and never will be real boys and girls. At best we are mimics. Most people feel awkward as teenagers, but for us that awkwardness does not resolve itself but instead crystallises as a syndrome – a collection of characteristics which, if we’re lucky, lie just beyond the normal deviation. Often the breakthrough is realising that whilst we can never be real there are rules that we can follow and that by carefully observing and mimicking these, by learning to play the game, we can seem real – sometimes even more so than the people who learn such things implicitly. We learn that the secret to relationships is eye-contact and listening. We learn to monitor our use of space; of the physical space around us and of the space we occupy in a conversation. We match phrasing and gesture. By concentrating on such things we find that successful interpersonal interactions in a finite context can easily be achieved.

But however good we get, certain things will mark us out and establish beyond doubt that we are not merely introverts or nerds: no matter how proficient we become interacting with people is always an effort and a challenge. Nothing is more exhausting than a day full of meetings; at the end of a such a day we can barely hear people when they speak. Unlike most people we do not actively seek out other people or interaction and encounters are only ever draining. A party can literally leave us feeling dizzy and sick, engaging in the ridiculousness of small talk in the shameful hope that at some point the conversation might turn to something important.

We suspect that other people can sense this instinctively: we are rarely approached, the seat next to us is invariably the last to be filled. It is as if when we are not concentrating on engaging others a light ‘goes off’ and people steer clear. If we are in a room with someone else we feel no need to speak to them – however long we are in that room – beyond the sense that according to the rules we should, or that it might make the other person more comfortable if we did so.

In meetings we struggle to understand turn taking – bursting with something to say, but it feels like trying to cross a busy motorway on foot. Eventually we dive in and cause a pile-up. Most of all, though, never, never understanding that because someone is your ‘boss’ that one should accord them, or their views, some special status.

Telephone conversations are difficult at best. This might seem strange, but calculating how to respond is so much easier with the help of non-verbal cues. Often people say ‘is this a good time to talk?’, sensing our phone strangeness. It’s such an effort of concentrate so hard to do pull these off – I find it helps to walk around. Physical contact is perhaps the most paradoxical area of all – if we are not careful we instantly give ourselves away here: protective of our distance, anxious regarding the decision to hug, kiss or shake hands. Even now it takes great effort of will to suppress this kind of trepidation. And yet physical contact can be where we feel most at home – the only real connection that we will have with another person.

I can’t help loving my routines – much as I despise myself for it, a stereotypical routine stops my day feeling like chaos, and when something spoils my plans I have to work hard to convince myself that things might still be ok. Humour is tough to master, but it should never be thought that we lack feeling: I have learned that it is only a very small part of the mechanism that has failed. Our mirror neurons work just fine; we empathise with the pain registered in the faces of sufferers, we cry in movies. It is as if our reward system doesn’t kick in for social stuff; we have to learn it the hard way because it doesn’t come naturally. We learn to connect with everyone and no-one.

Developing professional relationships over the medium or long term is almost impossible: there comes a point where other person realises that there is something ‘fake’ about your delivery – you see it in their expression – and from that point you are doomed. ‘Trust is essential’ as the saying goes, and there are few things more damaging than perceived dis-ingenuity. How do you begin to explain to someone that pretending to be a real person is what makes you the person you really are?

But it could be much worse. We are not excluded, we are not institutionalised. We find it easier than most people to visualise things or to spot patterns of thinking. Unlike most people we really do care about stuff – rather than just friends – and for that reason alone we have the potential for greatness. And we appreciate that diversity expresses itself in many ways, some more visible than other, but all forms essential to success in a creative world.”

Does this reflect you? Do you recognise this in the people that live and work around you? Give us your thoughts…

Etienne Wenger at Mediating Boundaries

Last week a number of us at Netskills attended the Mediating Boundaries conference, subtitled “Traversing the landscapes of online communities of practice.”

Quite apart from the fact that walking round the University of the Arts, London during degree show time was fascinating, it was a great conference. The event was scheduled to coincide with the presence of Etienne Wenger in the country and the day was based around his thought-provoking keynote and contribution to the discussions afterwards. There were also contributions from other involved in the Business and Community Engagement programme.

The video from the event will be available shortly and I’ll update the post when it is but here are 2 sets of reflections from the event.

My AudioBoo recorded shortly after…

…and these are Lindsay Jordan’s 3 blog posts on the “Wengerfest” as she calls it.

• Apprenticeship and Transformative Learning
• Identity and Community
• The Meaning of Life

My posting was a bit of a snapshot and Lindsay’s go much deeper but hopefully that gives you an idea of the richness of the event, particularly Etienne’s contribution.

John "K" (by-nc-nd)

I really like the people I follow on Twitter. They generate a real buzz of excitement about stuff that is happening that I find very energising.

The thing that gets the Tweeps I follow particularly excited is novelty. When a new idea, device, article appears that challenges a widely held preconception Tweetdeck just lights up as the thoughts bounce around like popcorn.

It’s a fairly trivial example but take the arrival of the 11th Dr Who last week (Matt Smith, brilliant BTW!). Science fiction is not a common topic amongst the people I follow but there was a certain amount of glee (common noun) about the arrival and “post-match” analysis.

I think this whole issue of novelty is important. Articles like this one suggest a strong link between novelty and learning so it’s not just about “oooh, look at the shiny!”

I loved working with kids for the moments when you show them something or they discover something for themselves and you can really feel the buzz as they get stuck in. I think that the people that make the best, most inspirational teachers are the ones who tap into this yearning for novelty and exploit it mercilessly.

There are many complaints that the world of technology never stands still. Devices become obsolete in a matter of months and sites like Bebo go from the peak of popularity to the dead pool in what seems like the blink of an eye. It’s actually what makes technology such a thrilling thing to follow. Educators need to develop different skills to manage these changes but if we expect our students to be able to adapt to a changing economy and society, the least we could do is follow suit.

Two of my new colleagues, Will and Steve, introduced me to the term digital fluency the other day as a way of describing the ability to keep up with a fluid tech-verse. It’s a topic I want to come back to in the future.

So, what I’m saying is that all the people that I follow on Twitter are Novelty Junkies. I suspect it’s not the technology itself that attracts most of these tweeps but the constant arrival of  new resources, devices, news and innovation.

AFTERTHOUGHT: I’m writing this a few days later after following @daveowhite’s keynote at the Plymouth Elearning Conference. There have been one or two tweets about how the idea of “perpetual beta” is accepeted by “players” (people deeply involved in examining new technologies) but anathema to “pragmatists” (people who are interested mostly in implementing tech to help them perform a function – not bothered by exploring). I find the idea of a world in perpetual beta quite liberating – nothing is ever quite finished, everything is in a constant state of renewal and flux and the community and conversation are part of the development. I don’t think I mean just with technology either; ideas, learning, relationships, art, architecture, music etc etc.

Credit - GenBug on Flickr CC

The 19th March is my final day as the Training Officer at Sheffield East City Learning Centre. I’ve been here for nearly 5 years and have pretty much loved every minute so I’m leaving with regret.

My next role will be with Netskills, a JISC supported group working out of Newcastle Uni helping HE, FE and other types of organisation use web-based technology in their teaching, learning, administration and research.

I more than a little nervous about a change of sector but it was a conscious decision based on  a number of factors too boring and personal to mention here.

I thought now would be a good time to take stock of a few thoughts about the move.

I will miss:

• working with young people. The potential for fun, frustration, surprises and discovery is massive. I’m sure working with a different set of people will be enjoyable too but I predict a little less knockabout fun. Working with young people is extremely energising (and curiously draining all at the same time).
• working with this team. In all the jobs I’ve done it’s been the relationships with the people around me that have made the good times brilliant and the bad times bearable. This bunch of reprobates have been great to spend time and work with.

I will not miss:

• running any more sessions on using Revelation Sight & Sound (great software but enough’s enough)
• the drive to work – 250 miles a week is a drain on time, momey and energy.
• some really rubbish devices and badly designed software.

And finally…

• I am extremely hopeful for the future of school education because of the level of passionate dedication from many of the teachers I’ve worked with and on my Twitter network.
• I’m also nervous about the future so long as there is this lack of political vision and willingness to take risk without fear of being pilloried.
• The iPod Touch. The Canon EOS450D SLR. The Sony V1E HD camcorder. My ultra-reliable Dell laptop. My two monitor setup on my desk. At 5pm, these are the devices that they will have to prize from my cold, dead hands!

I will be continuing this blog but the focus will change somewhat. Exactly how, I’m not sure yet.

Thanks to all the fantastic CLC staff, teachers and students I’ve worked with in Sheffield!

Image credit - Drinksmachine

For over a year there’s been a link to my blog from the Online Stopwatch site which is designed and run by my friend Aaron. This has been lovely as his site is insanely popular and it has generated a vast amount of traffic to this blog.

Last week I was getting about 600 hits a day which looked great in Statcounter. I’ve had 135,000 hits since I started counting in September ’08.

Trouble is, of those between 80-90% of my visitors stayed for less than 5 seconds and the vast majority never make it off the home page so it’s all a bit of an illusion.

I’m really not that interested in having a popular site. As this blog has progressed it has become more of a CPD tool for me and a way of keeping track of thoughts. Most of my contact with the rest of the ed tech community happens on Twitter now rather than through comments on the blog.

So, a few days ago I asked Aaron the remove the link.

Unsurprisingly, visitor numbers have plummeted from 629 pages views last Tuesday to 30 this Tuesday.

…and it feels very liberating!

If you’re reading this it is more likely that you came here for a reason other than accidentally clicking on a link and that for me is much more valuable than a huge visitor number vanity figure.

So, thanks for visiting. Happy St Patrick’s Day.

Fear - by Mark Sun on Flickr (CC)

As part of our MSc we’ve had to read a paper by Guy Merchant (2009) on Web2.0, new literacies and the idea of learning though participation. We were asked to provide a response on it in a form of our choosing. I thought I’d have a go with Audioboo as I haven’t really had a chance to play with it.

You can read the paper here. It’s well worth it if you are interested in web2.0 and social networking for eductaion.

My response was just a quick thing about the relationship between participation and engagement on one hand and fear on the other and how it links to reading I did as an undergrad about fear (informed or otherwise) influences behaviour in real landscapes. The book was by Yi Fu Tuan and can be found here.

I don’t draw any radical conclusions as this was more a way of recording some thoughts.

PS – Sorry about the tag cloud – slight issues following updating the plugin…

Cell by skatejpg CC on Flickr

This idea has been knocking around in my head for a few days. I’m not even sure it’s a practical suggestion but when you’ve got an itch you gotta scratch.

There’ve been quite a lot of new developments regarding CPD in the UK recently, the most obvious being the arrival of VITAL so it’s occupying a bit of my brain.

I’ve blogged before (and here) about my disillusionment with traditional CPD models where learners choose courses from a list, turn up and then hope to goodness that it changes their skills/behaviour. In many cases it might, but it seems like a hopeful scatter-gun approach to learning, not very effective if you are managing CPD for your staff.

I really like the Enquiring Minds model that Futurelab has written about where learning is directed by the learners, establishing a community that effectively teaches itself or drafts in outside help (professional or otherwise). It’s worth a look at and it’s being put into practice all over the shop (this for example).

The thing that interests me is the challenge of managing this group of learners especially if you are in a large organisation like a school or university. Groups of learners would have to be of a size that was self-sustaining without being overly big.

Also, not everybody wants to learn about the same things at the same time so how do you manage learning where the needs are so fluid?

And this got me thinking about Cell Groups. If you’re not familiar with the term, in a nutshell they’re a way of organising fellowship groups in churches (no wait, come back!) where a large congregation organises itself into small fluid groups where membership can grow and change over time. If a group becomes too large to sustain it is free to split. If members of one group feel they are a better fit elsewhere then they can join a different cell.

I was wondering whether this sort of model would work for CPD.

• In a school different cells would be formed for different special interests depending on where individuals’ needs for development lay, for instance, aspects of SEN provision, social networking as a learning tool, new literacies etc.
• Each cell would direct it’s own learning, collaborate, share experience and comment on each other’s progress.
• Within a cell, leadership wouldn’t necessarily be by any one person. It could be fluid or even non-existent, relying on leadership by consensus.
• When an avenue of development is judged by the group to be exhausted then the cell changes its focus or disperses and members join other cells or split to investigate other avenues.
• If individuals feel they are better served in different cells then they can switch mid-stream with the new group helping to support the new arrival in catching up.

The key thing is that these mini-communities

It’s all quite Darwinian. If it worked well then, with a bit of gentle direction,  the cells would form around topics that were of most professional benefit to the learners themselves and therefore the institution.

It could also be quite chaotic and difficult to manage from the leadership’s point of view. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Not sure. The role of the leadership team would be to support learners in taking their development seriously and helping them to reflect and put into practice. With learners owning their own development the benefits would be greater than just plonking someone on a course and hoping for the best.

I’ll probably find that it’s already been in use for years and I just hadn’t noticed. Typical, really.

So, itch scratched. I’ll probably read this in a few weeks time with my head in my hands but the reason for having this blog was to record ideas, however naff.

If you have any thoughts on this I’d love to hear from you.

Go on, put me straight.

CC Image - /Joe on Flickr

I have to be careful not to get too excited when a gizmo lands on the desk for us to evaluate at Sheffield East CLC. Having said that I was really looking forward to getting my hands on the iPod touch after hearing so much from other schools and CLC’s about using them.

I’ve had a few weeks to play with one now, although we haven’t used them with students yet, so I thought I’d capture my initial thoughts as an aide memoire for later. As with most things my opinion is likely to change but at least having this as something to refer back to might be useful.

What the iPod does is documented much better elsewhere so I’m not going to discuss that.My main point is a question, really, based on a conversation I’ve had with my boss. It’s this…

To what extent does the iPod Touch actually contribute to pedagogical change?

I start from the assumption that mobile learning is about transforming how learning happens as well as when and where.

The iPod is a great device for delivering content which is what it was designed for. It’s fun and a breeze to use for listening to podcasts, watching videos, looking at websites etc. It gets a lot harder when you try to actually create stuff and contribute.

Text input is fine for short spells but that gives quite a narrow field of ways of getting students to contribute to their own learning. If you want students to capture audio you’ll need to invest in earphones with built-in mic (which can cost up to £20). There are some nice audio apps (AudioBoo being one) but transferring sound out for use elsewhere can be a pain.

The lack of camera for stills and video is a big miss and would open up the door to myriad possibilities for developing visual literacy.

Also, a browse through the apps store for education titles is pretty uninspiring (although there are exceptions – I hope to do another blog post about some of my faves in the near future). Most are about drill-and-practice skill honing or showing information (sometimes in quite engaging and attractive ways, mind).

I don’t buy the idea that by giving a student a mobile device so they can access delivered content anytime and anywhere makes it a learner-centred experience. You need to maximise opportunities for  the learner to record and reflect on their own experiences and the iPod isn’t quite there yet although it’s a step in the right direction.

They key thing, though is that the device on it’s own isn’t going to be transformative other than perhaps adding novelty or increasing engagement. The learning culture around the device needs to find ways of using its capabilities to allow the learner to create and reflect more easily.

I’m not down on the iPod. I love it as a device. I just think that anyone investigating it as a learning tool should think as much about the environment the iPod will be used in as much as what the machine can do.

What are your thoughts on the iPod? Put me straight if you disagree…