Josie Fraser :: Blog

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008120216

This was the topic of a session I ran at the JISC CETIS conference; focussing on the agendas of work-based learning and other policy initiatives, the question for institutions is what would need to change, and what areas are actually ready. We had groups develop ideas and pitch them to video.

I had participants consider the drivers and influences on the process, the potential impact, the readiness for change, and the types of interventions that would be useful.

Briefly, the ideas presented were:

Validation processes that are agile and proportionate, enabling smaller courses and courses on demand. The recommendation is that pilots are developed with the regulatory agencies involved so that institutions can try out more flexible approaches to designing, validating and offering courses.

Enabling the use of net resources in education, supporting teachers and students in making effective use of resources and exercising appropriate discrimination. Recommendation is for materials supporting teacher education and student skills.

Marking processes that supports personalised coursework, where the submissions are less media-specific, enabling students to submit work in media they are confident in (e.g. video, text, audio) without causing problems for markers and institutions. The recommendation is to support a toolkit for "social marking" that involves students as well as staff in holistic rather than atomic assessment of student work.

Recognising prior experience in formal education, developing support for Accreditation of Prior Experiential Learning, and associated information, advice and guidance, particularly to support workforce development and linking education with employment. The recommendation is to support process modelling to better understand how APEL and similar processes fit today, and can be enhanced in the future.

Making the VLE flexible to handle new ways of learning, decoupling the processes of planning, engagement, and assessment in the VLE and reconnecting them more flexibly through a coordination mechanism, supporting, for example, engaging in academic planning and assessment in one organisation, but engagement in another - such as in a work-based system.

In their own words, here they are:

More information on the wiki

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/12/employers-do-not-understand-lea

Interesting survey by the UK Chartered Management Institute and reported in the Guardian newspaper.

“The institute interviewed 1,000 managers aged 35 and under, working in industry, commerce, local government and the police. Their most common complaint was that older bosses regarded the internet as “a massive timewaster”. Half said their organisations did not take up web-based technology until it was tried and tested, and 16% described their employers as “dinosaurs”. The survey found most young managers wanted to use the internet for research, professional development and other aspects of getting the job done. But employers treated it with suspicion. The survey found 65% of organisations monitored usage, rising to 86% in local government and 88% in the police. This led 65% of employers to block access to “inappropriate” sites, rising to 89% in local government and 90% in the utilities. Eighteen per cent of employers limited internet access to certain times of day, rising to 38% in the insurance industry.”

Some two years ago we published the results of a project looking at e-Learning in Small and Medium Enterprises in Europe. We undertook 105 case studies in six different countries. We found few instances of formal e-learning (or formal learning of any kind). However we found extensive use of the internet for informal learning. Older workers were more likely to use ICT for learning than younger staff. This, we concluded, was due to two reasons: older workers were more likely to have unlimited access to the internet becuase of their seniority. And older workers were more likely to have autonomy to use the results of their learning in the workplace.

The Chartered Mangement Instutute survey shows that businesses have still not progressed in their understanding of learning, less still in thinking about innovation. Informal learning is potentially the most powerful driver of innovation. But this requires both access to learning opportunties and work organisations which allow autonomy to utilise learning. Most businesses still don’t get it.

NB Sadly I cannot find an online copy of the Chartered Mangement Institute Survey. Probably costs lots of money. But you can download the book we produced - Searching, Lurking and the Zone of Proximal Development - E-Learning in Small and Medium Enterprises in Europe - for free.

I just  had a nice email from Emerald North State Primary School in Australia saying they wanted to use my PowerPoint narration program PowerTalk throughout their school and needed a letter of permission (presumably they're installing a network or thin client system).

I was really pleased to be able say that I had already given them permission by using the GPL Open Source licence. I took the opportunity to briefly explain the freedoms given to them when compared to restrictive proprietary licences. I can imagine they got other responses inviting them to purchase a site licence.

If Australian special ed. primary schools are anything like UK ones then Open Source enables those with very limited funding to provide students with great tools and a richer edSchoolsucational experience.

http://del.icio.us/troutcolor#2008-12-01

• http://laughingmeme.org/code/rss_parse.inc.with.enclosures
  modification of magpie to handle enclosures. I had used this before but forgot about it!


• Podtopia.net - How to remove noise with Audacity

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/fininformatica/VQIO/~3/471355454/

The Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Online Course (CCK08) is over.

First of all, thanks to the excellent facilitators: George Siemens and Stephen Downes!

Even though I wasn’t an… exemplary student the course has been a good opportunity for my research.

As part of my PhD work (that is focused on learning networks for Lifelong Learning) I’m now presenting a survey on the use of the wide range of technological tools proposed by the facilitators (and by some students, too) during the course.

I try to investigate uses and approaches to the web tools available for the course (taking into account users’ profiles, motivation, technological background, language, etc.) and to understand whether the absence of specific constraints on the use of the web tools (e.g. rules on time and/or purposes) was an obstacle for the participants, by generating anxiety and confusion or, conversely, fostered their participation and outcomes.

So, if you are a CCK08 student (no matter if you completed or not the course!!), I ask you a favour: please spend some of your time in replying to the

CCK08 Course Tools Survey.

The answers are strictly anonymous.

In addition, I’ll be glad to share the results with anyone interested.

Thank you in advance!

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/12/power-and-learning/

No, not the power of learning. Power relations and learning.

I worry sometimes that those evangelists (said in a nice way, I am one myself) of a new way of learning, ignore the power relationships in society. Education itself, will not change the world. Power remains unevenly distributed.  More problematically, it is not in the interests of those who run a our society to allow us all to learn for ouselves, unfettered by control - be it control to access ot learning or control of what we learn. Contrast these statments:

“Over the last ten years, this model has been seen in many quarters to be obsolete. We have seen the emergence of a new model, where education is practiced in the community as a whole, by individuals studying personal curricula at their own pace, guided and assisted by community facilitators, online instructors and experts around the world.

Though today we stand at the cusp of this new vision, the future will see institutions and traditional forms of education receding gradually, reluctantly, to a tide of self-directing and self-motivated learners. This will be the last generation in which education is the practice of authority, and the first where it becomes, as has always been intended by educators, an act of liberty.” - Stephen Downes

I wish I was as optimtistic as Steven. But read this from George Roberts’ newly launched work blog: “Irving Wladawsky-Berger, (read his blog) President Emeritus of the IBM Technology Academy and visiting/adjunct professor at MIT and Imperial College, argues, for a mixed mode of social control in which participatory governance models and hierarchical governance models share the challenge of institutional survival in a social darwinian market environment where, “… you make mistakes you die”.

Capitalism is adapting to new economic relaities of Open Source and global markets. Learning is powerful and education forms part of the ideological state apparatus. Power will not be ceded because we have a better idea of organising universal access ot education. Educational technolgits must understand these realisties and better still join those fighting for economic, social and politcial chnage.

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/11/twitter-updates-

• N85 - first thoughts.: Once I’d figured out how, exactly, to get the SIM card in - I then tried to g.. http://tinyurl.com/688dy3 #


• BBC & GMail work fine on the N85, University VLE works. Sort of. Not tried the chat or anything, and the layout’s v. sprawly. #


• Virtual Worlds.: The BBC’s click have a report this week on Virtual Worlds - looking at Twinity and .. http://tinyurl.com/59n7vs #


• N-85 TV: Just been testing the video - by watching a BBC trailer. Very impressed! Now wondering how I find.. http://tinyurl.com/69vtm6 #


• @dajbelshaw oh yes, my Gmail’s gone up to 7268 MB too, can’t say I’d noticed the chat, as I keep it disabled anyway. in reply to dajbelshaw #


• just about to go & listen to @stephendfry reading Harry P. while lying in my bath. #


• @mberry LOL! I see I’ll be seeing you in Brighton on Monday. in reply to mberry #

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Listen to this podcast

http://my-world.typepad.com/rworld/2008/11/participatory-governance

We all subordinate ourselves to, and participate in, groups. These may be states or other institutions at various scales: families, workplaces, corporations, education. In the context of a world in which "Absolutely everything is changing all the time," at a recent Harvard Berkman centre seminar, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, (read his blog) President Emeritus of the IBM Technology Academy and visiting/adjunct professor at MIT and Imperial College, argues, for a mixed mode of social control in which participatory governance models and hierarchical governance models share the challenge of institutional survival in a social darwinian market environment where, "... you make mistakes you die". The essence of the argument depends on one, metaphorised, aspect of darwinism: sexual reproduction; hierarchical governance can be crossed with participatory governance to yield a more robust hybrid. But, in the end, it appears that participatory modes of governance are only useful insofar as they produce innovation which enables adaptation for domination.

Simultaneously scary, inspiring, useful and banal, this is an excellent example of a totalising hegemonism, which only a representative of the really big and powerful can pull off. As he says, "Once you drink the Kool-Aid you understand this".

Technorati Tags: innovation, jisc-emerge, open source

Wladawsky-Berger is introduced as the "chief wise man" responsible for IBM's embracing of open source software and a participatory governance model of innovation management. He assumes, and imposes, axiomatic agreement on his audience by asserting that: "There is nothing I'm saying you don't already know." Even if there is dissent from the argument it should remain within a theoretical paradigm.

He argues that there is "... a global integrated system in which we want to bring together all processes, all information and all people [my emphasis], not just within one enterprise but since an enterprise lives within an industry ecosystem, it is very important that they be linked to suppliers, vendors and everybody else."

Presented with this, I believe "we" must ask, who do you mean "we"? Is this the "you", the audience (me?) who have been bundled into agreement with him in the opening moves of the argument? Or are we everybody else?

Wladawsky-Berger's theory, as presented here, has two axioms. The first could be, arguably, descriptive of a limited part of the world. The second is predictive and contains an imperative to action.

• The world is global, integrated, market-facing, service-oriented, complex and unpredictable.
  
  
• "It is a very existentialist world." "The marketplace is brutal." "You make mistakes you die." It is a social darwinian world in which competition to control "ecosystems" is the way things are; if asteroids are killing you you must adapt.

Putting aside, for a moment, the very open question of whether the world really is "market facing and service oriented", for Wladawsky-Berger, "Innovation is the only way to cope with this environment". "Absolutely everything is changing all the time." Innovation is what you need to do to survive. Innovation, he says, is essential to four things:

• adapt to changes
  
  
• go after new opportunities
  
  
• ward off competitors
  
  
• preserve leadership position.

This final point makes his argument problematic. The presumption that there is a teleology to evolution and that it can be directed (managed, controlled) for a particular, value-laden benefit - preservation of leadership position: innovation for domination - misunderstands Darwinism, or reduces it to metaphor. I might accept that innovation enables adaptation. I might also accept that struggle (going after opportunity/prey and warding off competitors) may be a part of an individual's survival strategy and that individual survival is necessary if one's genetic material is going to be passed on. But, he is at least conflating the individual with the species and then attaching a value (preservation of leadership position) to individual and species survival. Darwinian evolution is value-free.

The use of evolutionary theory as a metaphor for directed social behaviour, or a justification for domination has been problematic for many years: the British Empire embraced social darwinism as did early twentieth-century eugenicists and the Ku Klux Klan. But, it is not the only problem with this argument. The second is his use of the idea of systems thinking without a qualifier. It sounds as if he wants us to understand systems thinking as open-systems thinking; and, this would tie into the strand of his argument that derives from open-source software community governance as well as a certain, limited, openism which is displayed to IP: patent sharing. But, while he may have expanded the boundaries of his system, this is not the same as open-systems thinking. There are still many externalities, if you will: off balance sheet arguments.

In this world, deterministic models of control, such as might be applied to complex, manufactured, physical systems (e.g. engineering products; aeroplanes are his paradigmatic example), are inappropriate for dealing with "... unpredictable, human organisations." He argues that, "We [again, who?] are trying to apply systems thinking to organisations where, by definition, the components of these organisations are people performing services for each other... But systems composed of unpredictable parts (people) are, of course, unpredictable."

His touchstone example is the current blip in global financial systems. This moves him to anchor his argument in a wider discourse, citing the work of Carlota Perez (official website; Wikipedia). Perez (2002) argues that techno-financial cycles follow a pattern:

• technological revolution
  
  
• financial bubble
  
  
• collapse
  
  
• golden age
  
  
• political unrest (taken from online extracts)

This pattern is caused by three underlying factors (Perez 2002):

• "technological change occurs by clusters of radical innovations... that modernize the whole productive structure"
  
  
• "functional separation between financial and production capital, each
  
  pursuing profits by different means"
  
  
• "the much greater inertia and resistance to change of the socio-institutional framework in comparison with the techno-economic sphere"

And, she suggests that there have been about five of these since the industrial revolution. She is a bit imprecise about the first three. Coal, canals, railways and steel: "...the recurring sequence is hidden under many layers of unique factors, events and circumstances." But, she is clear that the US stock market crash of 1929 heralded the previous collapse, and she sees the the dot com bubble as the "financial bubble" preceding the current collapse.

She says: "Each technological revolution has led to the massive replacement of one set of technologies by another... Each involved profound changes in people, organizations and skills in a sort of habit breaking hurricane. Each led to an explosive period in the financial markets."

Each revolution can be characterised by paradigmatization, or what she calls "common sense principles", its "techno-economic common sense", its "general logic", its own "pragmatism" (see also Perez 2004). But, there is no one paradigm. "Each technological revolution is different, each paradigm is unique, each set of solutions needs to be coherent with the problems to overcome and with the logic of the techno-economic paradigm, its opportunities and its best practice."

So, for Wladawsky-Berger, our techno-economic paradigm is digital: the Turing universal virtual machine economy. "This [global integrated system] is all the digital economy." He cites the commoditization of digital components, which are permeating every aspect of society. The digital and physical world are merging through, for example, digital modelling and digital instrumentation.

The characteristics of this paradigm: innovation for domination, its "common sense pragmatics", the corollaries of the innovation for survival theory, if you will, are that:

• society is open and collaborative
  
  
• business is global and diverse
  
  
• technology is multidisciplinary.

Wladawsky-Berger suggests that business governance, in the past, was not subject to innovation, but that today the bulk of innovation is process, not product: culture innovation, policy innovation, and probably most importantly, "how to make money." His question is, how can we apply innovation-based thinking to governance? But, there is an error. Governance has always been subject to innovation. Henry Ford was a great innovator of industry governance. The history of the oil industry is the history of - to say the least - innovative business governance. The bureaucratic revolution enabled by the mass production revolution was, as made famous by F. W. Taylor (1911), a revolution in governance as much as production. It is not as if governance was once "just something that happened" and now can be subjected to the common sense pragmatics of innovation for domination. Governance and domination have always be associated.

Every two years IBM surveys the chief executive officers (CEOs) of many organisations through their Global CEO study. The recent (2006) study asked CEOs, where was the source of new ideas in their organisations? Externally they replied, business partners and customers; internally: employees. So doesn't this beg you to ask what is the CEO (and the CEO's salary) for?

In the past innovation was the role of laboratories. But labs invent stuff and innovation is not about stuff anymore. Innovation is necessary for "fulfilling people's desires so they pay you money so you can sell them anything." Wladawsky-Berger's hand is tipping. "Innovation is about fulfilling peoples desires so they will buy what you are offering... It is Freud's question: what do people really want." He sees social networks as a mine of innovative ideas: "reaching out to people as communities and get information and knowledge from them; get blogs from them, get wikis from them: lots of ways of extracting knowledge and insight from them. We reach out and see what you can learn from them." We and you and them again: "If you want to be successful in the marketplace you need to reach into those sources of knowledge and see how you can tap them... You try to tap them in the most social networking way possible."

To me this all seems one way: "you" i.e. the co-opted "we" of the hegemony takes knowledge from "them", and uses it to maintain leadership position. IBM only gives when it is to their advantage. Patents and IP, it is suggested, can be not only proprietary but enabling. Sharing IP "protects your ecosystem... and attracts people to be a part of your ecosystem." But, like the "we" above, whose is "your ecosystem"? Is he using "you" as the impersonal pronoun: "one"? But, which "one"? The royal "one"? The ones like us: IBM? Is he really addressing the audience directly: you are we are one on this?

So, what, in the end does this have to do with governance, really?

Only late in his argument does he bring in hierarchism and contrast it with participatory models. He describes three models of governance:

• hierarchic: top down
  
  
• distributed: bottom up
  
  
• balanced.

Open source communities share code to facilitate collaboration and improve software. Open source software is better because everyone sees what you do so you do it well, document it and continually improve it. Proprietary systems: closed source, does not subject itself to public scrutiny and is poorer for it. So to get the best software use open source communities.

IBM's advantage is no longer in the stuff of software, but in the protection of their ecosystem. He describes the governance of open source communities as "participatory". The problem is "who is going to get them organised? Who is going to get things done?" He observes that participatory does not mean egalitarian in the Linux community. The "committers" are the management team. "There has to be a group of maintainers who take things from the community and do things with it."

When it comes to investment, also, hierarchy trumps participation. $100M comes from the top. The top is to do with control of the money. "You need somebody who can write a $100M cheque. The job of bottoms up is to generate ideas and when the ideas are in a certain shape they meet the management team and the hierarchs have to select them and fund them and get them out there.

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/11/n-85-transferrin

I decided to try to copy my contacts list from my phone to the N85, it all seemed to go smoothly, the Nokia PC Suite moved the contacts etc. However, when I then wanted to send a text, it wanted to know the message centre. I guess were you to get one on contract, with its own sim, rather than taking a (payg) card in/out of an existing phone, it would already know its message centre - rather than having to put the card back in the other one & copy (manually) the centre number down.

I’ve now located some instructions - for things like enabling the predictive text (which wasn’t in the material that Nicola pointed me to, nor was it in the help files on the phone - at least, not that I could locate!)

The particular phone I’ve got has an EU plug … I’d thought I’d got an adapter at home, though, of course, most of my adapters are for me going to the EU, not to plug EU things in. Luckily I remembered that one of my other devices has a dual plug thing on the end - an EU plug plugged into a UK one. (Could do with more of these sockets!)

(Taken at CAU in China)

The text seems to have gone fine, now that I’ve added the messaging centre.

I never did seem to be able to get iPlayer content on it, but I was able to play some ITV previews. However, from reading the iPlayer site, as it’s necessary to download & then transfer to an N95, I wonder if it’s the same for an N85 (which would be a pain, having to install the full iPlayer, rather than using the Flash streaming). Or, perhaps I should just try another programme.

Listen to this podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/fininformatica/VQIO/~3/470369826/

Un ottimo video di Wendy Drexler, un’insegnante della Florida, che ha seguito il recente corso CCK08.

Realizzato come final project del corso, in puro stile CommonCraft, il video spiega i principi fondamentali del connettivismo in cinque minuti.

Magnifico lavoro!