I have been stewing over e-portfolios and PLEs lately, particularly as we head into the new year and avenues by which to further traverse the (e)learning meta-scape!

I came across this recently:

A PLE is composed of a set of customized applications on the client side. Some of them will operate in a standalone way, while others will exchange information with server side applications. Thus, if a PLE becomes essential for the daily work of a user, the data flow between client and server side applications will allow the automatic feed of the social networks to which the users belongs to.

PLE bricks for social network construction « Personal Learning Environments

This short post on the PLE blog got me thinking about Donald Norman’s book Emotional Design (2004), particularly his closing remarks about design. It’s a dilemma many designers - educational, architectural, mechanical, etc contend with - that is, if we design it will they come? The quote above from the post doesn’t say ‘PLE’ to me, more it says ‘here are tools to generate your PLE’. Same goes for discussions around ‘e’portfolios - portfolios are methods, processes, learning approaches, outcomes, etc - adding an ‘e’ only says this is a electronically supported portfolio, another tool or space for me to generate some learning/living/reflection - or whatever frames the portfolio approach in a pedagogical sense (meaning that we are all pedagogues).

Donald Norman (2004),

We are all designers. We manipulate the environment, the better to serve our needs. We select what items to own, which to have around us. We build, buy, arrange, and restructure: all this is a form of design (p.224, my emphasis).

And further on,

We are all designers - and have to be. Professional designers can make things that are attractive and that work well. They can create beautiful products that we fall in love with at first sight. They can create products that fulfill our needs, that are easy to understand, easy to use, and that work just the way we want them to. …. But they cannot make something personal, make something we bond to. Nobody can do that for us: we must do it for ourselves (p.225, my emphasis).

And finally, this,

We are all designers - because we must be. We live our lives, encounter success and failure, joy and sadness. We structure our own worlds to support ourselves throughout life. Some occasions, people, places, and things come to have special meanings, special emotional feelings. These are our bonds, to ourselves, to our past, and to the future. When something gives pleasure, when it becomes a part of our lives, and when the way we interact with it helps define our place in society and in the world, then we have love. Design is part of this equation, but personal interaction is the key (p.227, my emphasis).

It’s not that we should give up and throw away design, or PLEs, or (e)portfolios; more that we can pass on the design decisions to others - which to me is what educational design should be about - learning the ropes, grappling with the concept, checking the landscape, reviewing and entering into the commentary, adding to the ‘research’, sharing the learning, and, ultimately, our lives.

PLEs are just this - US. We learn. We test that learning. We refine. We share with others. They share back, and with more others… it’s not the application, or the content, or the method even - it’s the interactions and the relationships that form and uniform as we learn, unlearn and relearn. Much like life really!

technorati tags:design, emotional_design, Donald_Norman, educational_design, PLE, e-portfolio, pedagogy

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Catching up on my feeds and landed on Dave Pollard’s blog once again - if there’s anything I read up close it’s Dave’s blog.

# THE FIRST KEY TO CHANGE: Relate: You form a new, emotional relationship with a person or community that inspires and sustains hope. If you face a situation that a reasonable person would consider “hopeless,” you need the influence of seemingly “unreasonable” people to restore your hope–to make you believe that you can change and expect that you will change. This is an act of persuasion–really, it’s “selling.” The leader or community has to sell you on yourself and make you believe you have the ability to change. They have to sell you on themselves as your partners, mentors, role models, or sources of newknowledge. And they have to sell you on the specific methods or strategies that they employ.
# THE SECOND KEY TO CHANGE: Repeat: The new relationship helps you learn, practice, and master the new habits and skills that you’ll need. It takes a lot of repetition over time before new patterns of behavior become automatic and seem natural–until you act the new way without even thinking about it. It helps tremendously to have a good teacher, coach, or mentor to give you guidance, encouragement, and direction along the way. Change doesn’t involve just “selling”; it requires “training.”
# THE THIRD KEY TO CHANGE: Reframe: The new relationship helps you learn new ways of thinking about your situation and your life. Ultimately, you look at the world in a way that would have been so foreign to you that it wouldn’t have made any sense before you changed.

How to Save the World

I’m not sure where I’d be (in my head, that is) if Dave wasn’t around to offer some points of focus!

Change is imminent in my workplace - the path is now set, and the time for transition is upon us. Dave has proffered these timely points regarding change management, which I’m blogging here as a reminder for myself, should I feel lost along the way! These points above remind me again of the notion of emergence, or emergent design. Following this, Dave posted a conversation he had with Rob Paterson about the future of education, which I’m now going off to listen to.

I’ll post more in response to this shortly :o)

technorati tags:change, change_management, Dave_Pollard, emergent_design, future, organisational_change

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I’ve picked up on Tracy’s posts recently as I’ve really seen a connection with her process and mine around the nature of emergent practice, where practice leads to (rather than being based in) theoretical approaches to learning and teaching. Perhaps some call this praxis?

Following on from her curious curriculum, Tracy talks a bit more about her teaching process - this time about ambiguity.

Crossing over, I’ve also recently picked up reading Tom Haskins’ blog after meeting him (online) in Sydney last week. Tom’s post, Learning from not really learning, got me thinking once more about the unsettled moments and ambiguities we encounter daily in our work and life.

Those liminal spaces help us to reach forward in our learning as we grapple to understand and make sense of new knowledge. So too, in a changing workplace, we are often in the same state, yet it seems that very quickly we try to find the closest ground, somewhere ’safe’ with some semblance of permanence or firmness. This seems normal in a high state of change, such as a restructure, for example.

Liminality requires time and space. It requires careful holding and is, as Tom reiterates in his post about learning, a process not a product that we can mold. It’s an intangible feeling (usually a feeling of vulnerability) that is often uncomfortable. When we feel uncomfortable, we of course seek comfort. In the learning process we seek understanding in order to feel a sense of comfort and feeling of achievement thus follows.

In learning, these liminal spaces require empathic intelligence (from within us and with others), not a rush to achieve learning outcomes. They require little content and are more a space to wander through one’s learning in process. They are tumultuous and unsettling but have space for stillness and reflection.

‘They’ are not spaces really - liminality is us and our journey towards knowing, where we realise we are on the threshold of understanding.

Thanks Tracy and Tom for your quiet words of wisdom.

technorati tags:liminality, change, emergent_design, learning, practice-led, spaces

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I’ve been reflecting on recent events and readings that have caused me to ponder the state of play in education institutions, especially where much change is evident, and particularly around flexible learning (restructuring is the ‘tool’ of the naughties right ).

We’ve seen a growing push for industry engagement with flexible learning, nationally and locally. We’ve seen professional development and its links to broader strategy in varied ways. And a good deal of time has been spent deliberating over the benefits of global versus local efforts on standards and systems. More broadly we see much discussion and activity around the changing nature of learning, of teaching and of organisations that ‘conventionalise’ both (for want of a better word).

What I seem to be hearing in amongst all of this (and from a range of parties) is a ‘need’ for specialists or strategists to make sense of this thing called flexible learning, which is fine and to be expected. But also I’m hearing that “we want YOU in our area/centre/team”! Perhaps it’s a symptom of the constant struggle we see between the centre and the local site. As a specialist, I work in a central area and have the good fortune to work with many people covering diverse subject areas. For example, if I was to be ‘coveted’ in one area specifically, does that not diminish my opportunity to work across a range of sites? Why couldn’t I work across sites of learning?

[image: RobertFrancis]

Embedding specialists is somewhat different I think. Embedding requires an understanding (by the ‘embedded’, the ‘embedder’ and the ‘embeddee’) about the part the specialist will play in the strategic development in that local site. There is a sense of semi-permanence enough for the specialist to work within the parameters of their ‘placement’, yet still remain attached to the network or ‘centre’ (should there be one), thus remaining connected to other activities and developments.

So why covert specialists? What is at stake here? A specialist is usually part of a special interest network or collective (that validates their ’specialty’), and can communicate changes and developments in their area of specialty more broadly too. When I say specialty I don’t necessarily mean expertise, rather, I mean a focused area of interest, where one is motivated to delve deeply into that area to uncover more and learn a great deal. When a specialist is ‘coveted’, there is limited opportunity to share one’s learning and growth with others who understand that specialty in similar ways. Also, the propensity to ‘on-sell’ those experiences is of benefit only to that locale, not necessarily to the ‘greater good’ (or the other areas of an organisation, pragmatically speaking).

It is important, from a specialist’s point of view, that one is able to carry ideas, learning and innovations from one site to the next; thus, sharing corporate knowledge and supporting long-term growth, shaped by the diversity of their practice. Specialists then also have the freedom to engage with others in their field of interest on broader matters, keeping the lines of communication open for emerging knowledge, ideas and approaches.

I return to the emergent design thoughts I’ve raised here before. Practice enables understanding. Focused practice develops specialised skills and knowledges. Specialisation returns to practice to benefit others, growing the broader schemata. Thus, research and development fuses with practice-led innovations for the benefit of all, rather than applied as a play-thing for the few to meet immediate (often ill-defined) needs.

technorati tags:specialist, learning, strategy, future, professional_development, emergent_design, practice-led, research_and_development, covet, centralised, networks

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samsblog thinking IM think/write:

. . . reason is that we all have different views and ideas. This group effort has enriched my knowledge of e learning and given me a positive PLE

longtail dreaming? ??

your immersion — contention — assertion

explicate ::

dswaters: @leonardlow there is a debate heating up in http://etools.ning.com/ about it right now

!the biG BIG jump

Enso ; (円相) . . . symbolizing enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and the void; it is also an “expression of the moment”.

“expression of the moment“

“expression of the moment“

“expression of the moment“

loosley joined — conjoined — rejoined

. . . Balance is not the same as neutrality. Neutrality only seeks the middle. In kyudo practice we are equally aware of the left, the right, the middle, all of it. How long have you been practicing? One more again, practice. This is my hope . . . – Kanjuro Shibata

holding spacespeople

sharing thingsfeeling

being learningdoing

peoplefeelingdoing

peoplefeelingdoing

people feeling doing

people feeling doing

technorati tags:PLE, liminality, spaces, poem, reflection, nswlearnscope

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Reposted from OTN@CIT:

This from the del.icio.us wikieducator tag via sparkered.

A QR code generated from Wikipedia for use in physical spaces, equals Semapedia.

I tried it out using the kaywa reader and now have the Wikipedia entry to liminality on my phone as I write.

It works like this:

Image: Semapedia

Imagine some of the applications, if you will:

• quick lookup of definitions (those that apply to one’s workplace perhaps)
• find out more about an artist, locale, music band, suburb…
• orientation information within an institute or business or…

At present this is set up for Wikipedia and other ‘Wikisites’. If opened up to Wikiversity, Wikieducator, etc the possibilities are motivating!

technorati tags:QRcode, semacode, semapedia, wiki, wikipedia, mobile, mobile_resources, wikieducator

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I was sifting through my Bloglines feeds and came across a slideshow via elearningpost, by Leisa Reichelt. It’s quite timely, as our small team has been looking into refreshing our approach to supporting - and leading the way for - teachers to design and develop online learning in their subjects. Here’s more on “us”…

So, I checked out this one:

http://www.disambiguity.com/waterfall-bad-washing-machine-good-ia-summit-07-slides/

…then was keen to see what else Leisa had done and spotted this one:

http://www.disambiguity.com/social-project-management-at-enterprise-20/

I began this post when I got to this slide which outlines a Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

The following points have me breathing a sigh of relief that others are also thinking along these lines!

• individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• working software over comprehensive documentation
• customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• responding to change over following a plan

In these points I see interaction, responsiveness, collaboration and action, which says to me that we should try refocusing our design process to be FIRST a communicative one, rather than a content-driven one. That is, not WHAT you want to do, but start with the WHY then look at the HOW, before settling on the WHAT.

Project based work and developmental projects really do require a high level of organic activity, to allow room for creativity and growing of an idea. Often, we’re (especially managers insisting on outcomes and deadlines) easily caught up in paperwork, processes and attempting to work with others who have so little time to ponder, explore and indulge in creative activity (because of paperwork and processes!!), that we end up forgetting why we were doing all this in the first place!

I shouldn’t talk in the third-person like this, because really, that’s been my feeling over the past few months - why am I doing this educational design work again? What is it achieving? Well, after some time letting such thoughts and issues percolate, it seems to be that now the time is ripe for some change!

I have attempted to look at our work processes using this diagram to sort of “draft” my own thinking, as we continue to discuss this as a team. I’m liking the emergent bit (think emergent design) and probably need to flesh that notion out more…

Oh, and thanks to Leisa for helping me to get my thinking back on track! :o)

technorati tags:Leisa_Reichelt, disambiguity, user_experience, educational_design, emergent_design, organic_process, Gliffy_diagram, work_flows, developmental, online_learning

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Design is in everything we make, but it’s also between those
things. It’s a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and
philosophy. Erik Adigard

I haven’t posted in a while. My head is stuck in a range of things at the moment, so thought I’d share a little of what’s been going on.

One of our key staff members has left and consequently there’s a big hole where he once was - makes me wonder sometimes about the art of succession and also how timing can really suck! It’s also seen the never-ending tension between teaching and learning and technology bubble to the surface once again. More on that another time!

Which brings me to my next ongoing reflection; that of evaluation. We are currently evaluating a possible replacement for our institution’s online learning environment. For me, this has thrown up a heap of thoughts about learning management systems (aren’t they supposed to be dying?), and the evaluation process itself (and what that’s supposed to mean). I wonder if we are evaluating the right thing in fact? Is it really the technology we should be evaluating? We’ve attempted a participative evaluation process and it will be interesting to delve into the mechanisms in more depth at some point to tease out the implications of this. Already I’m seeing some aspects which require managing the tensions between organisation-level input and grassroots-operational input. Nothing new there I guess, but in terms of change mamagement, what have we learned and how far have we moved?

I’ve come across some interesting reading around this, which has led me to read more about emergent design. I began with Dave Pollard’s post on designing for emergence, which prompted me to search for readings and articles on emergent design and how it’s been used in various projects and organisations. I found a couple of projects, one run in Thailand by MIT and a Sydney based project, both of which discuss emergent design in some form. I’ve also bumped into Roger Clarke’s oft-quoted and well known work, Diffusion of innovations (3rd ed.) (1983). How relevant is Clarke’s work in our education design practices today?

The notion of emergent design (i.e. Guba and Lincoln and naturalistic inquiry) is something I am looking into as I develop my research proposal for a Masters, and it has also impacted on my view of the role of education design in learning settings. I’m about to read this article on design models as emergent features in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology (2006).

Apologies if this sounds all a bit oblique - I will be posting with more substance and detail shortly, but was keen to put some words down as to how these processes have impacted my work flows in the last few weeks.

I will be writing more about evaluation, emergent design and strategic levels of innovation in due course.

technorati tags:evaluation, innovation, emergent_design, participative_evaluation, musings

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. . . the time has come for learning innovation and innovators to seriously re-consider and re-define the educational “space”. I also find the idea of slow in today’s world need the active but invisible support from technology- and perhaps this will be technologies greatest contribution - to change in the way people (including children) learn [Geetha Narayanan in 'comments'].

Geetha Narayanan on slowness and wholeness in education. Listen to the recorded conversation via the Knowledge Tree and read/hear her article too.

[dev null]

You have taken the red pill and there is no turning back; you will see how deep the rabbit hole really goes! (Apologies to The Matrix!)

technorati tags:slowness, Geetha_Narayanan, wholeness, Knowledge_Tree

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It is now generally recognised that there is an acute shortage of specialist teachers of mathematics and the natural sciences. The same is true of foreign languages, while history teaching in many schools is entrusted to teachers who lack training in the discipline. Why is this? Readers involved in the councils of our state secondary colleges will no doubt recall some of the arguments over staffing. Even if you can attract a teacher qualified to teach mathematics, French, history or literature, a case will be made for filling the vacancy with a teacher of one of the vocational subjects these colleges have been encouraged to develop. But all too often you can’t find a young maths teacher to replace the grey-haired one who has retired. This deficiency leads us to the universities. University departments that teach these core disciplines are under heavy pressure. Physics and mathematics used to attract many of the brightest undergraduates: now those with talent for mathematics are more likely to pursue degrees in information or biological sciences, where the career opportunities are greater and the salaries higher.As enrolments decline, so the funding for such departments dries up, and in many universities they have contracted or disappeared altogether.There is a similar predicament in the faculties of education. Since teaching cannot match other professions in prestige and rewards, these faculties struggle to attract the brightest undergraduates. Education faculties are poorly resourced.

Learning’s heavy load - Opinion - theage.com.au

Stuart McIntyre in the Sunday Age, April 1, outlined his observations on the current debate by the two primary parties over Education.

I paid attention when I read McIntyre’s points quoted above. We’ve had Rudd’s plan for early childhood education, as he slowly makes his way through the sectors in time (we hope) for the November election, but on reading McIntyre’s words, I wonder if we have a tragic chicken-and-egg-thang going on? That is, do we prepare our youngest learners in the first instance - then worry about how they might handle secondary schooling, VET or higher education? OR, do we need to look (as McIntyre highlights) to our universities NOW and address the chronic shortage of people who may at least be interested in teaching in these various sectors and thus, teaching our young children to begin with?

Where do we need to invest NOW, to make ongoing changes at later stages across the sectors? One reaction is that perhaps we have silo-ed the sectors a little too much in the past - an education revolution has nothing to do with paper shuffling and rhetoric, and plenty to do with making some real gutsy changes!

So why not have a go? Given the proposition outlined by McIntyre, what might we need from our unis to help facilitate:

1. more discussion about both the early-childhood-education and national-curriculum-in-schools leads outlined by Rudd,
2. a turn-around of the brain-drain across education sectors as retiring teachers move on and newer teachers give up in frustration, and
3. a cultural change in the way educators - and learners - are viewed and treated by various sectors of society?

So, why not have an education “faculty” that stretches across or is embedded within all others? Surely a faculty of science with a strong science education presence is more likely to encourage budding scientists to also contemplate a career in science teaching, no? Perhaps you’d argue that this wouldn’t work because there’s already a good deal of educational research going on in the field of science education in our education faculties currently - but, my point would be, why is this work removed from the discipline itself? How much longer will we continue to extract theory from practice (or practice from theory you might also argue)?

Let’s do a quick scan of a handful of university science faculties to see how ‘present’ a focus on science education really is:

A Singaporean university has an active science faculty with research interests and centres for nano sciences, mathematics, chemistry, and medical imaging (to name but a few), but nothing obvious around science education per se.

Next, a Canadian university which does display some information about the teaching and learning initiatives undertaken by the faculty, promoting project-based learning and with a sense of community orientation, easily found from the faculty’s homepage. A portion of this centre is taken up with processes and procedures to support academics in their teaching, but it’s good to see that centre of this nature has come about from the faculty’s concerns about teaching and learning in the faculty itself.

On to an Australian university, with a range of pure and applied sciences, and although once more we see support services and information for the benefit of students and staff in the faculty, along with some obvious connections across departments, there seems little overt connection to other faculties like education. As with the Canadian university, there is also recognition of the linkages to community.

And finally, to a New Zealand university, whose homepage praises the quality of their lecturers and outlines the range of programmes on offer, yet, again, there is little mention of the education strategy through which such a faculty might engage students as prospective science educators in their own right.

• Do we require our universities to take stock of a bigger picture view of education, as it relates across faculties and disciplines?
• We see in two of the four examples above active links to community - could this be extended to include more active pedagogical links?

Not all that long ago universities were talking about a research-teaching nexus (briefly here and here), where one strengthened the qualities of the other to provide a scholarship of teaching embedded in a discipline: so what happened? Instead of an emerging ethos that brings teaching and research together, we have a research quality framework (DEST) audit process  - the expectations of which seem to also extend into learning and teaching - which sees “research” unis separate themselves further from “teaching” unis! AND which seems to also separate teaching from education research! Oh, the tangled web we watch unravel! :o)

Hmmmm. Where do we go from here? How do we somehow contain and try to make sense of these mixed messages about “what’s best” for our education system in Australia coming from various sources (and mostly with a government flavour)? Oh, and will we be hearing more from the state education ministers on this “national curriculum” idea?

Perhaps these words again from McIntyre, may help develop a solution or two:

However, it is mostly the disjunction of school and university that handicaps the country’s educational performance. We are told certain areas of knowledge and understanding are vital to education, yet we do nothing to ensure they are sustained in the universities, and nothing to co-ordinate the two. The school is treated as a command economy, the university as a strange island of entrepreneurialism and consumer choice subject to intrusive regulation from Canberra. As we approach the federal election it would be helpful if the two main parties could attend to the disjunction.

Image: MJA, 2004

technorati tags:education_revolution, national_curriculum, KevinRudd, JulieBishop, StuartMcIntyre

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