More Discussion on Personal Work Learning Environments June 10, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog, politics , add a commentTony Karrer has usefully kept track of a list of 16 out of the outburst of blog posts continuing the discussion around PLEs and work:
More Discussion on Personal Work Learning Environments : eLearning Technology
Then he wonders…
.. if people will adopt these tools and approaches over time, then as a corporation, if you want to be able to keep the content after an employee leaves, especially blog content … then shouldn’t you make sure you provide these tools now rather than having tools adopted that are outside the firewall and personally owned where you will lose the content if the employee leaves?
which kind of confirms the point being contradicted in Jay Cross’s comments:
Pitting individuals against corporations is not productive. Nor is the implication that businesses are out to steal workers’ intellectual property.
Work PLEs internet futures and social relations June 8, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, edublog , add a commentA little spat between Stephen Downes and Jay Cross triggered by the current discussion around Personal learning Environments ( PLE ) may help to uncover important fundamentals.
Jay Cross seems to think that the social revolution against corporate ownership of the means of production has already happened:
Informal Learning Blog :: Nonsense from Stephen
In fact, fewer and fewer of us work for corporations; we’re doing our own thing. Free agent nation.
I just wonder how inclusive is that sense of “us” in the context being depicted here. There may well be the beginnings of a trend towards self employment, and free agency. I hope to encourage and enable that trend on a global scale through the pajamanation initiative , but at this stage it is still a dream of a possible future for the vast majority, and those small numbers who do currently make a living as freelancers are more often than not beholden to one or more large corporations for most of their future contracts.
Work life for the masses is still very much a question of handing over your time and labour power to the owners of capital in return for a fraction of the fruits of those labours, and the reality of so called “self employment” for a lot of trades is often nothing more than a tax ruse by the employers or a means to enable easy laying off of workers without liabilty for redundancy payment.
Within that environment, the ultimate purpose of corporate training is to benefit the sponsor, not the personel’s out of work hours life or future prospects at another employer or as a freelance.
So the reason why some people are passionate about genuinely personal PLEs is because of the potential to shift the locus of power and control in favour of the individual, and it’s no wonder they get twitchy when it seems like there’s a danger of the whole thing getting subsumed back under the wing of the corporate interests and educational institutions.
It’s not just about PLEs really, but the internet. The very existence of a global communications network with limited central control would appear to offer the possibility of a shift in the balance of power on a number of levels, and some of that is already happening to some extent, but is the mere existence of the technology sufficient? The iternet is still very much an infant in the process of being born and the future shape of how social and economic relations will be structured is possibly up for grabs, but perhaps the opportunity will only exist for a limited period. Underneath it all, the most fundamenal contention continues to resurface over who will end up owning and controlling the bulk of the means of production, the means of life. It could be a tiny tiny minority of billionairres as at present, it could be a collective of everybody acting as a whole, or it could be split up amongst all of us as individuals.
Tossing the PLE out of the window June 5, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog , 1 comment so farThere’s an interesting seminar discussion taking place at SCOPE this month, with the two Dereks and others.
My initial contribution is reproduced here:
Who’s willing to toss the PLE idea out the window?
I’m willing ultimately, to reduce the PLE down to something so simple as to be almost meaningless, such as “the browser” or “the internet”. But perhaps there is a case for pragmatism and looking at where a lot of intitutional learning is currently at, and how far it can be pushed in one phase without appearing to threaten their very existence too obviously.
In introducing the PLE concept there are already attempts to contain it within an institutional framework. “Here is your PLE which we have supplied for you, and now you are required to use it if you want the accreditation”. Developers seeking to “implement” PLEs because they’ve been asked to build one by somebody who will never really accept the idea of student autonomy which is inherent in the curriculum based on process rather than content described above.
Yes, I was a student myself quite recently, and I was able to use my own “PLE” as the basis for learning and even assesment which suited me fine. So at the end of three years I came out with a history of accounts with various online services, but also an established blog and a chaotic wiki both running under my own domain which I think is important. I’m a great believer in the “small pieces loosely joined” approach but there is also a danger in encouraging people to hand over control of their PLE to the service providers such as Google, Facebook etc or even James Farmer.
So I say, encourage them to buy and set up their own domain name and installed applications as early as possible, then they will have genuine ownership of a useful and enduring set of tools for lifelong learning which nobody else can delete at the end of the course.
Are junk information diets killing us? May 16, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog , add a commentShawn Callahan bemoans the way students use Google and Wikipedia..
Anecdote: Our information diets are killing us
The majority of the students were relying on Google and wikipedia to support their claims and arguments. The only journal articles referred to where the ones I made available in the shared online space.
So why not put all the journal articles on the public web where they can be easily found via google and cited in Wikipedia? Insisting that students learn how to delve around in the hidden internet is just a way of perpetuating that particular academic digital divide.
Worried wifi workers well warned May 3, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog , add a commentWhere shouldn’t you place your laptop? On your lap, apparently.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Wi-fi? Why worry?
They should be calling for the closure of TV and radio transmission towers rather than asking us to turn off our wi-fi laptops.
The modulated frequencies that carry Radio 4 and ITV into our homes are just as powerful as the wireless networks, and a lot more pervasive.
And my wireless network is only carrying data when I’m online, while Radio 3 burbles all day long, possibly exciting electrons in my brain and causing headaches.
Then there is the danger from photons of visible light streaming down onto us as we work, since these carry more energy than microwaves and could surely do more damage.
Perhaps we should demand that our children work in the dark.
Computer Literacy is dead March 25, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, edublog , 1 comment so farBill Kerr provides a link to a video, some transcripts and discussion. The topic is the One Laptop Per Child project and the pedagogy behind it.
Bill Kerr: “we are impatient, we don’t want to lose another generation of kids”
The most subversive thing on the software front is the ebook reader as a wiki - you get the world’s literature - some of it’s great and some of it’s not - then two things happen:
* every page in every book has a discussion thread
* every page in every book can be augmented, changed and illustrated
Apart from all the ideas about learning, I noticed that one of the technical properties of the OLPC hardware is a screen that stays bright and readable even in bright sunshine. Now that’s something which would be appreciated if incorporated into the laptops used by anybody who likes to work from their own back garden sometimes.
Students assessed with Wikipedia March 7, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog, UK, Wiki , add a commentVia Linda’s Furl…
BBC NEWS | Education | Students assessed with Wikipedia
Postgraduates at the University of East Anglia are being assessed as they edit existing Wikipedia articles and research and write their own pieces.
Students have to edit eight articles on the online encyclopedia and then write their own article for the site.
When this year’s pilot scheme is completed, Dr Pratt will assess its success and hopes to be able to widen the scheme to undergraduate teaching as well.
“New technology opens up new ways of assessing students and we have to explore those.”
I just wonder if the assessment tail won’t find some way of wagging the learning dog as with Jill/txt’s blogging students
The novelty of blogs is wearing off February 28, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog , add a commentAccording to jill/txt, the novelty of blogs is wearing off…. in formal education:
this is in a course where the topic of the first half of the course is blogging, where they have to include two blog posts in their portfolios
Possibly formalising the informal a little too far there, but you can only work with what you are given…
Basically they just ignore it all. And they’re smart interested students. Who are bizarrely enough writing papers about blogging while saying they don’t really understand blogging. Because you’ve only posted three posts to your own blog, I tell them, tearing my hair out.
Some useful insights in the comments there as well.
Action Research to develop Wikiversity February 26, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, edublog, Action Research, Wiki , 1 comment so farMy friend Gordon just alerted me to an Action Research project to develop Wikiversity, which is pretty exciting for me being so close to my own research interests on the application of action research methodology in a distributed environment.
Developing Wikiversity through action research
This is a series of steps that correspond to an action research methodology for facilitating and assessing the development of Wikiversity.
What is Action_research according to Wikiversity:
Action research is essentially a collaborative activity in which people enter into a progressive cycle of reflecting in/on their own practice (or environment) and changing/improving this practice/environment.
What is Wikiversity
Wikiversity is a learning community
Who:
Anyone can participate.
One intended outcome of this project is a PhD thesis. (Comment from Cormaggio: I want to make this explicit from the beginning, however I don’t want to lay personal claim to the research process, as it is genuinely meant to be a fundamentally collaborative activity - see User:Cormaggio/My? research.)
Futurelab - Flux blog » learning platform January 18, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog , 1 comment so farThe glossy brochure which arrived through my door told scary stories of Personal Learning portfolios which are now being introduced in schools, later forming the basis of a lifetime psychometric profiling, not under the control of the learner but used by institutions, agencies, governments. People left to themsleves apparently, will create their own identity under the influence of peer groups which may not be considered appropriate, therefore the state should create their profile for them. Hmm.
The blog however, tells a very different story. One of the writers, Martin Owen, “gets it”.
Flux » Articles » The learning now arriving at platform…
TThe Learning Platform provision is a realisation of the dystopian view of ICT and education that Frank Webster and Kevin Robbins have warned us against since 1986. Webster and Robbins have suggested that the main thrust of application of ICT in education is an updated version of Henry Ford’s production method (neo-Fordism) to education. It maps onto a view that Ken Boston presented at a Futurelab conference that there are 3 phases to introducing ICT – first it is to use applications like word processing as a glass typewriter, in the second phase we automate our current practice. It is not until we reach a third phase do we transform your practice. Learning platforms are SO second phase.
At worst the Leaning Platform mentality is about tracking, delivery, assessment, recording… it is a production line, sausage machine vision of education. There is a paradox here. Just as we are waking up to Web 2.0 – the do-it-yourself-but-with-a-lot-of-others web we propose a highly constrained system for school. I am all for letting the computer take on a lot of the administrative load – however most learning platforms do come with a pre-defined neo-Fordist pedagogic model (even if its developers do not realise it). I am all for managed learning- but I would like to see learners doing some of the management. We already have a platform – it is a computer linked to the internet. We have an abundance of tools for working together. Interoperability comes from TCP/IP, XML and the HTML protocols. It is a point of departure to many exciting places.
The tools that are being produced for social software and web 2.0 applications develop almost organically, interoperate where needed (RSS feeds are wonderful) and respond to emerging needs. They do not try to predetermine what is needed by a platform or demand that a questionable vision of an education and training technical standard needs to be adhered to. These tools are responses to perceived user needs and vanish if they do not meet them. These systems take real advantage of the transformational power of the internet and do not propose to impose old ways of thinking onto it.
Educationists should consider embracing the small pieces , loosely joined mentality. The idea that we need an electronic learning factory is so out of touch with the real needs of our times
Yay for small pieces - cheap, fast and out of control!
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