I developed an enthusiasm for social software and Web 2 tools through my interest in ePortfolios.  I am a bit predictable, each time I drift across a new tool I very rapidly recognise its potential to support learning. I am becoming increasingly addicted. I am using the tools; I am joining the brigade of professional talking about the tools but am becoming increasingly frustrated that I am unable to influence their adoption in main stream practice. I am talking the talk more and walking the walk less – so a bit more talk then! I began to wonder whether all of the talk had resulted in us designing a ‘concept’ learning environment; but like a lot of the clay models in the motor manufactures design offices, a concept that does not make it to the production stage?

I can see many good reasons why schools should not allow/encourage the young students in their care to use the emerging tools. Perhaps it might be useful if we forget these for a while; put to one side the suspicion that young learners use and enjoy using the same tools outside of school, and consider the case for promoting social software in schools.

The tools and technology have the potential to:

• Support 1:1 and 1:many and many:many multimedia communications between learners anywhere in the world, for ‘free’;
• Provide learners with access to information and to the research tracks of others who might be, or might have previously, searched for similar information;
• Provide learners with the opportunity to share their research and their research tracks with others;
• support the learner as they make connections with others,  to enable them to follow and collaborate with others who have similar interests and purposes;
• provide the learner with opportunities to publish their thinking and findings and to obtain comment and feedback from others;
• enable learners to record and share their thinking from wherever they are working;
• provide an active, interactive environment capable of engaging learners;
• capable of supporting anywhere, anytime access to learning
• support what learner do naturally, to provide the majority of the elements that learners are likely to accept as their Personal Learning Environment;

It is our responsibility to prepare young (and older) learners so that they can function in a world where emerging technologies are being accepted and embraced.

I cannot see that schools will be able to resist pressure to use these tools indefinitely. Eventually they will accept them and begin to build on them. I do not know what it will be that actually tips the balance. It might be the development of a new set of management tools or safeguards, or perhaps simply that we accept the tools as valuable and decide to educate and manage the risks?

OR are we approaching a Luddite swing towards traditional, proper learning with teachers straightening up the desks and requisition a new box of Interactive White Board chalk. Drawing an analogy with the credit crunch, have we built learning environments on ‘foundations of sand’? The constantly changing sand (ICT and social software etc) and prevailing currents (national expectations etc) making it impossible to construct anything on it. An acceptance that with everything constantly changing, it is not worth building anything, it will simply fall down!

Or do we, as builders do,   build a concrete raft that will spread the load and build on top of the raft. If the sands shift the worst that could happen would be that we ended up with ‘the leaning tower of learning’. Ahh – tower, ivory tower are we looking out from it.

Could the learning process act as the raft? The learning process would ‘sit’ on, be supported by, the emerging as well as traditional tools.  New tools are then unlikely to phase the learner, they will evaluate them and either adopt or dismiss them.

I distilled, from an earlier attempt at summarising the PLE discussions that I had followed , http://tinyurl.com/57eugd that it is what the learner ‘does’ in their Personal Learning Environment that really determines what they will learn.  What they do in the environment is more important than the environment itself. [I take the environment as meaning where they work/operate/learn, in its broadest term.]

Individual will learn something from any environment that they operate in. It is our job to create/contrive the physical environment and then cajole, encourage and support our learners to ensure that they encounter the experiences and stimuli that we hope will result in learning taking place. Not any old learning, but the learning that we, or ‘somebody’, thinks will be important to them.

While the physical environment provides learners with access to the tools and resources it will be the ‘teaching’ that will provide the experiences, activities and support that will supply the opportunities for learning. The ‘teaching’, in whatever form it takes, will: create the climate for learning; wet the learner’s appetite; create the need for learning; encourage learners to recognise when learning has taken place and encourage them to take responsibility for their own learning. It will need to create the space that will allow learning to happen and hopefully and provide learners with an experience that will enable them to be creative and that they will enjoy.

The bad news, or the big challenge, is that this is unlikely to be what the majority currently accepted as teaching, where large groups of students arrive every hour, expecting to be entertained, expecting to be taught a separate subject and expecting to be examined every 5 minutes. Re-stating the obvious, but creating a Personal Learning Environment for every learner, that is delivering the required shift in emphasis from teaching to learning, will need commitment, imagination and resource.

So leaving the hard bit, for now, and moving on! How the learner operates in this new environment, how they behave, how they use their initiative, how they interact with others, how they manage their time, how they support others, how they employ their different learning styles and how they deploy their different intelligences will affect how and what they learn.

To be able to survive and learn in the environment Learners will need to develop a set of skills, the Personal Learning and Thinking skills, the Functional Skills and, another skill set, yet to be defined, that will enable learners to use the tools and approaches that we are beginning to recognise as having potential to support learning.

Back into the loop; learners need to work in an environment that provides the appropriate opportunities for them to operate as independent learners – the environment needs to exist before they can work in it – what they do in the environment determines how and what they learn – to function in the environment they will need to develop a specific set of skills.

How do we break-in to the loop?

I listened to a radio programme that discussed the problem created by all of the space debris that was whizzing around, in orbit, just waiting to collide with some thing.

I related the space debris hazard to the distractions that surround learner and my thinking, thinking and thinking about ePortfolios, PLEs and Social Networking to the over-cooking bit. I began to think back 20 years when I watched Woodwork and Metal work [as curriculum subjects] being over-cooked to make Technology. Practical subjects that had most everything - practical problem solving opportunities where learners developed, practiced and mastered skills; where they developed the ability to select the most appropriate tools for their purpose; where they learnt to protect their own heath and safety, and that of others.  They had (often) opportunities to be creative, to work with others and to enjoy what they did. Then it got over-cooked in the name of rigour and academic acceptance.

So learner have access to the majority of tools that they need to manage their own Personal Learning – should we not concentrate on encouraging them to just do it?  Oh – tried to pedal that message before http://eduspaces.net/jpallister/weblog/177464.html

The man on the Bill says ‘someone out there holds the key for this, they just don’t know’ it yet – are you the one with the Key that will unlock this?

They will need self discipline and independent learning skills.  In PLTs terms they will be Reflective learners who will be expected to "evaluate their strengths and
limitations, setting themselves realistic goals with criteria for success”. They
have to “monitor their own performance and progress, inviting feedback from others". They will need to be Self-managers who will be expected to "organise themselves, showing personal responsibility, initiative, creativity and enterprise with a commitment to learning and self-improvement".

These budding Self Managers, will have to balance their desire to be recognised and accepted by others; their desire to influence the community that they operate in or that they want to belong to, with their desire and need to learn. In a traditional classroom situation, the teacher attempts to manage and moderate these distractions for their learners. In a Personalised Learning Environment the learner will need to take responsibility for moderating and managing these distractions.

How can we help them to develop these skills?

What have I got out Twitter? - Lots and lots - I enjoy the frequency of posts; I have learned by following the links that those that I follow have suggested/recommended; I have found others who have similar interests as my self and, quite difficult to admit, but I get a little bit of enjoyment from ‘listening-in’ on the conversation/chat that goes on as well as following the travelling/wanderings of others.

How are people using it?  - to chat; to ask for help: to publish and promote themselves and their work; to share links to resources and to share their thinking.

How am I using it? – Really only finding my way around and experimenting. I am learning by follow links. I have not got drawn into much chat but can see the potential of something that encourages you to generate and share bits of thinking; thinking that is not well formed enough to be bundled up into ‘full’ blown blog post.  

http://twitter.com/jpallis001

Will it take over from the Blog? – lots of micro blog posts = a blog?

When we are thinking about the  Personal Learning Environment  that we want to create, support and maintain for our learners we need to consider how we will provide the ‘space’ that will enable the learner to learn in that environment. Space in a busy curriculum; space in a busy day; space free from excessive distractions.

And then there is the ‘space’ to enable teachers to develop the skills that they will need to support learners as they operate in their Personal Learning Environment.

Well, I began to think about ‘busyness’ and how too many demands/activities /stimuli can affect learning.

In a classroom environment with a high degree of structure or regimentation, learning opportunities are scheduled and delivered/presented to the learners. The learners will have other learners around them.

These other learners will sometimes work with them and support their learning. On other, perhaps more frequent, occasions they will provide distractions and will interfere with the planned learning. The learner might learn something but the opportunities provided might not be strong enough to compete with the distractions.  The distractions, or ‘noise’ in information transmission terms, can present itself in many different forms ranging from excessive audible noise levels to the disruption caused by learners attempting to  seek the approval and recognition of others. Whatever form the distractions take they are likely to affect the learning that happens.

Learning in a busy environment presents challenges for everyone, digital natives, digital immigrant, digital visitors and digital residents alike. Perhaps we need some  way of equipping learners with ‘blinkers’, something that will help them to focus on their learning, something that will hide distractions from them.

A solution; move the other learners out of the room and provide the learner with a computer with internet access. With nobody in the room to distract, the learner will be able to concentrate on whatever learning experiences/opportunities that are provided by the computer and whatever it is connected to. 

Can the 1:computer/internet relationship have the potential to function as blinkers?  Will the environment that we provide learners with allow them to focus on learning or will it be even ‘busier’ than the classroom environment that we are suggesting that learners need to move away from?

In our excitement and enthusiasm for the new tools and technology, might we be introducing more ‘busyness’ and distractions for our learners? Will we be able to create the space for our learner ever to be able to fully harness the new tools and technology to support their learning in the ways that we are proposing?

Over the past two years. I have enjoyed learning from and 
contributing to many online communities. Recently  I 
benefited from the support of a community. I recount 
my tale here and share some thinking. 
 
As a teacher, I went in to school in August to collect my 
A Level results.  They were all one grade below what I 
and my students were expecting.  I was really 
disappointed for my students; I felt that I had let them 
down.  I thought the problem, was just my problem, 
a problem that I and my school would need to resolve; 
a problem that only affected my students.  
 
For two weeks I questioned my professional competence;
 I racked my brains to identify what I had done or not 
done that had resulted in my students not achieving the 
results they deserved. I lost sleep and found it very difficult 
to concentrate on anything else. I looked to the Examining 
Board’s Applied GCE ICT e-community and found that
 many other ICT teachers had also fallen foul of the 
conversion factor that had been used to standardise 
portfolio marks. I was not alone. 
 
Simply by knowing that improved my mood. I then 
discovered that the same problem was being discussed 
on a TES forum. Contributing to the discussion helped 
me and I hope, helped other members of the community. 
Participating has not helped me to explain things to my 
students and has not, as yet, convinced the Examining 
Board that they need to take some action. However it
 has reinforced my belief in communities, communities that 
are enabled by ICT, communities that could not exist 
without ICT.  
 
e-enabled Communities have a lot to offer. Individuals who 
might be working on their own anywhere in the world 
can communicate with others; they can share and develop
 ideas and, as in this case, support each other.  
Communities bring people together; they give individuals 
‘voice’. For ‘voice’ to mean anything, somebody must 
listen. If no one listens or values what individuals say, the 
individuals will stop contributing and participating. 
If people do not collaborate and participate we will not
 need the Web 2 tools that are being developed.  
 
Communities can provide organisations with very valuable 
feedback. The pay-back for the organisation for hosting
 or supporting a community is the access that they get to
 thinking/feedback of the individuals who expend effort, 
for no fee.  Incredible value for money!  
 
If we are to capitalise on the potential of Communities we
 will need to understand how Communities function, 
behave, develop and evolve. From an amateur perspective,
 it would seem that if we encourage our learners to 
contribute and participate we must, as well as providing them 
with an audience, encourage the audience to listen 
and value the contributions of the individuals. This would 
be true for all communities.

Sounds like a good idea, and the good news, web supported Communities of Practice are here today, available to anyone who wants to create one, or join one. But unless someone does something to start a community, nothing will happen, and the community will not exist.

The hard work for the Facilitator and founding members really starts once the community has been ‘set-up’. Somehow other people, who might have an interest in the Community must be identified and invited. Then some ‘pump priming’ discussion or activity, that might interest and engage new members, must be started.  

Leigh Blackall  http://tinyurl.com/55nx7m  suggests that 10 - 20 people need to be actively involved in a group for it to have a life of its own. Assuming that only 10% of a group are likely to contribute and participate most groups would need to have 100 - 200 members.

Unless you have a ‘captive’ community, pulling together 100+ learners takes significant effort. This recruitment stage is critical. Having joined a community, individuals tend sit back and follow discussions before they decide to contribute. If the discussion is not of interest to them they will not contribute. If they loose interest during this early stage they may to move on to something else. Facilitators have a very important role to play in ‘pump priming’ during the early life of a community.

Most individuals need encouragement and support before they will participate and contribute to a discussion either online or in ‘real’ life. They need confidence and a belief that their ideas and thinking have value, and deserve to be shared.

So once the group/community has been created; members have been recruited; pump priming posts delivered; members supported and encouraged; membership has risen to 200, the group/community will have a life of its own. The facilitator can then put his/her feet up.

A ‘facilitator’ must be convinced that there is some benefit to be had from setting up a community, and must have a fair amount of available time. They could, of course, choose a topic that has the potential to engage individuals who already have the confidence to participate. They would need fewer member and less pump- priming posts before the Community takes on a life of its own.

But when would the rest of us get the opportunity to belong to a Community? When would young learners, learn how to participate?  I need to do a lot more thinking!