JOHN MILLNER

Surfing

The second half of this week's task I think I DO understand, after a bit of head-scratching. We are commanded to go forth and surf! Starting with the Mellon, Carnegie and Hewlett foundation sites we're supposed to fan out across the dubbya-dubbya-dubbya like a pack of professional bloodhounds, sniffing out reliable data on innovative projects and good practice in the field of technology-enhanced learning.

Now surfing is something I already know how to do thankyouverymuch, as I'm sure does everyone else on this course. But of course we were never taught to do it: we just picked it up, like we picked up how to ride a bike, so our learning was largely implicit and unconscious - and now that we've done it a zillion times we never give a moment's thought to the high-level searching, sifting, scanning, evaluating, lateral thinking and high-speed decision-making skills involved.

This exercise, if I understand it aright, is designed to make our surfing more explicit, to get us self-observing and documenting our websearch - reflecting on it - so that we become more aware of the expertise we're deploying.

And in the process, we begin to build up a handy database of reliable information sources on eLearning projects, especially if the pack works together. Here's my list of project aggregators (funders, etc):
http://www.google.com/notebook/public/07304674743685839873/BDRNQSwoQ57-fsPIh
And here is my list of the most interesting examples of innovation and good practice in eLearning that I've come across so far:
http://www.google.com/notebook/public/07304674743685839873/BDRQnSwoQr5a_hPMh

Both are work in progress; and both will grow more quickly if we make the notebooks collaborative so they can be built and edited jointly..

So get off your deckchair (if you're still in it) and come on in. You've got nothing to lose but your towel :o)

Something missing..

Trying to get my head round this week's activities left me feeling about as clever as two empty deckchairs. I had to read the instructions about 10 times and sneak a look at several other people's blogs before I finally managed to make 2 little lists of 'eLearning competencies' and 'research skills' that I plan to develop.

Then I made two more little lists of ways I could improve my research skills - practising, discussing, and reflecting on them - and also document them - describing the research process, keeping the notes, and writing up research reports. (I won't inflict the lists themselves upon you: they're nothing to write home about.)

Can this be all we are meant to do in the first part of this week? Have I missed something?

I think maybe too much ranting does yereddin..

The H808 Ranters' standard

The Ranters were a sect of radical religious freethinkers of the 1640s who foreshadowed the Quakers and got their name from their habit of 'witnessing' very loudly at their meetings, often held in pubs. Like the 'true Levellers' or Diggers who published this leaflet, Ranters believed in equality, redistribution and democracy, and that the earth should be shared as "a common storehouse for all". They were antinomialists (didn't like rules) and millenarianists (2nd coming merchants) and were said to occasionally take all their clothes off to demonstrate that we are all equal before God.

The H808 branch of Professional Ranters which Sarah Horrigan and I are setting up will not attempt to follow all of the original sect's practices, however; we will confine ourselves to having a good old blog-Rant - a Blant - whenever we have to read something that is puffed-up, pretentious, jargon-ridden, formalistic, shallow, nonsensical or shoddily written.

So if the course reading ever Makes you Wanna Shout - then rally to the Ranters' standard. You'll feel much better after a good Blant.

ps - In case you were wondering, the True Levellers Standard print, announcing the establishment of a socialist agrarian commune on George Hill in 1649, is - as it should be - in the public domain.

Shipwrecked!

I fear that I ran aground on Conference Sands when I posted a somewhat immoderate diatribe against the articles by Clegg and Dealtry we were asked to read this week. I probably should have kept my ranting to this blog, where it feels much safer, and you can go back and edit it!

But despite having slept on it, I still think it's astonishing that two such badly-written articles could find their way into what I assume to be respectable academic journals. Clegg has clearly swallowed a dictionary of late-twentieth century philosophical terms without being able to digest it; while Dealtry innocently uses words like 'developmatic' which don't and never could exist, is regularly ungrammatical, and peppers his text with ugly and tautologous multiply-compound nouns such as 'learning to learn process practice'.

As for the content of their papers, here is my analysis:

Reflecting or Acting? Reflective Practice and CPD in HE, Sue Clegg et al, 2002, Reflective Practice vol 3, no 1

This paper draws on a range of texts on HE learning theory (most notably Tomlinson, Atkinson and Claxton), and on a piece of original research in which 47 academics were interviewed after participating in two separate CPD courses, to demonstrate two rather obvious things:
1) that for many practitioners there is a time lag between experiencing something and reflecting on it, and
2) that professional development involves a ‘complex .. relationship between reflective and active components.’

En route to this stunning conclusion the authors draw up a typology (they call it ‘four typologies’ but what they mean is a fourfold typology) designed to demonstrate that while some learners reflect on new experiences immediately, consciously and explicitly – other learners do their reflecting implicitly, unconsciously and after a time lag. This is not only true, but - surely - a truism, and one we hardly need a pretentious diagram and fourteen pages of research to be convinced of.

Finally the authors - aligning themselves with the ‘anti-cognitivist’ arguments of Claxton and Tomlinson - argue for a reassertion of the importance of practice within the ‘reflective practice’ paradigm, to guard against the danger of ‘drift into philosophical idealism’. This is an interesting argument but is stated rather than explored or developed, and is certainly not born out by the paper’s meagre research findings.

Professional Practice: the savvy learner, Richard Dealtry, 2004, Journal of Workplace Learning, vol16 no 1/2

This article describes a professional development programme for business managers designed to help them become independent learners. The programme employs a very standard ‘action learning’ approach with peer group sets facilitated by tutors, coaches and mentors.

The programme is based on an also very standard lifelong ‘learning to learn’ transition framework in which learners progress from passive, taught learning towards dynamic, self-directed learning.

Managers on the programme begin by drawing up a ‘CV plus’, a self-appraisal tool for recording their personal and professional development and major decision/learning points up to the present. They do work on analysing their personal learning style and team profile and performing SWAT analyses to prepare themselves for managing the learning process.

Apart from these implicitly reflective activities, Dealtry’s programme does not involve any explicit reflection on practice. Instead it offers what the author calls a ‘praxiology of learning’ (an obscure reference to the work of the 1960s Polish reist philosopher Kotarbinski) – which turns out to be another fourfold typology, this time categorising both learning tasks and learning situations as either Familiar or Unfamiliar. What this typology tells us is that learners feel least at risk undertaking familiar learning tasks in familiar situations, and most at risk undertaking unfamiliar learning tasks in unfamiliar situations. What a revelation!!

And that – apart from a lot of badly written waffle about ‘learning to learn process practice’ – is it.

How it helps us to spend half a week reading and thinking about this stuff really is beyond me...

How good is this dawn?

Consider this sunrise, if you will, and evaluate it using the grading system Boring/Standard/Exceptional. Or if you prefer, give it a mark from 1 to 5, where 1=Missable and 5=Gorgeous. Please consider the quality and variety of light, the palette of colours, the shapes and patterns in the clouds, the grace with which the sun slips above the horizon and plays magic-lantern in the clouds ...

There is a part of me that resists all this grading and measuring. Like sunrises we are all unique, and uniquely brilliant. Even a dawn that looks drab from where you stand will be beautiful to someone watching from a different location. Surely human practice - teaching, learning, nursing, building things or anything else - is a quality of experience not a quantity of stuff to be measured?

Sombre thoughts along these lines were partially dispelled by reading the brilliant article Work Matters: the Professional Learning Portfolio by Susan Groundwater Smith, one of the Week 11 resources. She talks about documenting rather than grading developing practice, and locates it in the context of Habermas' idea of an emancipatory, collaborative discourse. She describes the ePortfolio process as a scholarship of practice, and - again quoting Habermas - emphasises that it is not an individual and separate activity, but "one conducted in circumstances where freedom, equality, companionability and rational public discourse prevail" - a description which actually brings to mind the quality of interaction on this course!

Such a collaborative process of documentation and evaluation would of course promote the professional and personal growth of all involved. And of course I recognise that a profession needs to set benchmarks for the knowledge and skills required to practice it. But still there's something about grading people that makes me feel uneasy.

Perhaps it comes from watching too many dawns.

A true professional

This cow (snapped on an early morning walk near my home in London) is dedicated to what she does, conscientious, kind to her field-mates, and completely ethical. She is a true professional, and she's got the ear-tag to prove it.

One of our tasks this week is to look at the practice codes of some other professional groups, and I decided to look at nurses and software engineers - which I guessed would have very different professional cultures. However comparing the two professions' ethical frameworks reveals an astonishing degree of overlap (as you can see from this comparison grid: Download file) - while the values in both codes would not need a great deal of adaptation to also be relevant to education technologists. Could there be a single set of fundamental ethics which applies to ALL professional groupings?

Reading people's lists of professional values for education technologists in the course conference this week I find the idealism both inspiring and daunting. Commitment to lifelong learning, respect for students and colleagues, understanding of technology, patient communicator and facilitator: can anyone actually live up to these high standards? I'm not sure I can.

My friend Daisy, on the other hand...

The professional soldier ..

Remembrance Day reminded me that soldiers too are often called professionals. But what can the word 'professional' mean in the context of the obscenity that is war? Can you be more or less professional about the way you kill someone? What soldiers do for a living is surely the abnegation of all a professional educator holds dear.

If we talk about professional soldiers it is because as members of a standing army they feel part of a culture and tradition of soldiering in which 'honour' is highly valued; because they have a strong esprit de corps; and hopefully because they see their terrible work in terms of serving their fellow citizens.

Most soldiers do not choose to go to war. They are sent off to fight and die by another group of professionals who often start wars, but never fight in them. Instead they devote a great deal of energy to infighting, manoeuvring and sabre-rattling. With a few exceptions, they do not value honour at all highly, but will do anything, however dishonest, to cling to their power and their wealth (for their profession yields a very good living). They talk a lot about public service, but it is mostly lip-service and the public seldom believe them. I refer of course to professional politicians.

Funny old word, professional, isn't it?

In a spin..

How many abbreviations can a normal person absorb in one week? ALT, CMALT, HEA, HEFCE, ILT, JISC, SURF, SCOP, CALT, QIA, RAE ... My head is spinning with all these acronyms and initialisms! There's even an acronym/initialism hybrid amongst that lot, which is as rare a thing as a hen's tooth. I never knew academics were such abbreviation-junkies..

While we're on the subject, it may interest you to know that St Catherine - she of the wheel - as well as being the patron saint of wheelwrights and mechanics (a group of professionals whom I take to be the rough mediaeval equivalent of education technologists) is also the patroness of female students everywhere.*

*The Catholic Encyclopedia, 'St Catherine of Alexandria' [online] available from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03445a.htm (Accessed on bonfire night 2006)

Week 9 Reflections

Up until now I would have said (like Sarah Horrigan at
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/H808/smlf2/008105.html ) that elearning was 'just something I do'. I have never thought of myself as a professional. It's true that when compelled to choose from a dropdown list of occupation types on one of those webforms I've often ticked the 'professional' box - but only because all the other options seemed even more inappropriate!

Partly this is because, not being a teacher in the normal sense, I don't have a formal qualification for doing what I do, which nowadays I would describe as a combination of editorial/craft skills and middle/senior management. Like many people in web production I gravitated towards it because I was fascinated by it, and one of the things that drew me was the experimental, jump-in, frontier spirit - an amateur rather than a professional mentality. I was trying stuff out, learning by doing. I was an eLearning practitioner.

Despite this, having thought quite hard this week about what constitutes a 'professional' I find there are many things on the checklist that I'm happy to sign up to: a fairly high level of practical skill, the exercise of personal judgement, the observance of standards, the need for continuing self-education, and above all the idea of a highly-valued public service.

So I found this week's reading and discussion around the idea of professionals and their role in different models of post-industrial society not only extremely interesting but really helpful for sorting out what I think about my own practice as a non-teacher working in eLearning.

I came to the conclusion that the professional package comes in two distinct versions: what you might call a professional lite which covers the list above – public service, high level of skill, personal judgement etc – and a high-cal professional which adds some other things to the mix: a defined body of theoretical knowledge, exclusive entry via specialist training and qualification, and a degree of self-regulation by the profession as a group.

Julia Penny in her blog (http://blogs.open.ac.uk/H808/jp5783/008425.html) convincingly demonstrates that eLearning does not qualify as a high-cal profession like accountancy. But could it be an ‘emergent’ high-cal profession: a profession-lite that’s moving in the high-cal direction?

My favourite piece of reading this week (apart from reading my colleagues’ blogs – a real pleasure) was the short definition of eLearning I found on the EIfEL site at http://www.eife-l.org/publications/eifelglossary/elearning:

eLearning is more than mere technology enhanced (or supported) learning as it is essentially an organic transformation process, supported by technologies, and affecting:
* learning individuals
* learning communities
* learning organisations, cities and regions

- a statement which really brought home to me the massive potential of eLearning not just to deliver learning in different ways, but to deliver different, more potent types of learning: learning which is transformational. Thinking about this, and about the massive and accelerating speed of development of digital technologies and behaviours which those working in the field need to stay on top of - not to mention the developing pedagogical and cognitive theory which needs to underpin their practice - made me realise just how demanding and responsible it is to work in eLearning.

Perhaps we do need a high-cal professional structure after all, with specialised qualifications, CPD training, some form of oversight and all the rest of it? Certainly there’s a palpable hunger for eLearning training out there: half an hour’s googling threw up 8 academic (mostly post-graduate) courses in UK universities, with a similar number of commercial in-service training courses aimed at the business sector.

If eLearning is to be ‘professionalised’ then I think I agree with Helen Day (http://blogs.open.ac.uk/H808/hd634/008306.html ) that this is probably a profession with an expiry date. Helen argues that we will only need an eLearning profession for as long as it takes for eLearning to become thoroughly absorbed into mainstream education; at that point all educators will be eEducators, and hopefully everyone of us will be an eLearner. It will be something we all just do.