21st century learning and the Walsall Gigaport

Ok, so you might think that I'm trying to cram two stories into one here, but I am interested in how local and national strategies can be fused to improve life locally.

The power of technology to enhance local regeneration is highlighted by the Walsall Gigaport project, which is described thus: "Ambitious proposals have been unveiled to create 'Walsall Gigaport', a 21st century technology platform to attract new industries to the region." Big broadband, wireless. mobile plans that we hope have knock-on effects beyond business incubation into schools, colleges and the public sector, as well as upskilling local people and not simply replacing them with new knowledge workers. An integration with the aims of the Community Broadband project and the outcomes of the Onsnet project in Nuenen would really help engage hard-to-reach communities with the potential of 21st century thinking, learning, playing and acting.

This type of technical infrastructure underpins the world that has been highlighted in Charles Leadbeater's report for the Innovation Unit on 21 Ideas for 21st Century Education. Leadbeater makes some big points, some important points that we all need to think about. A few, for me, are as follows.

1. "Children need to be able to rely on ‘relationships for learning’ at school, home and in the community. That is why a learning strategy for this century cannot solely focus on school, and school itself needs to be radically reformed. The idea that education is just a system of schooling invites the idea that the best way to improve it is through the techniques of mass customisation, efficiency and quality improvement, driven on by central targets, national strategies and inspection regimes."
2. "[Innovators] seek to achieve these outcomes by ensuring children have the relationships they need to motivate them to learn. That is why so many of these efforts to refashion the school are creating new ‘communities of learning’ akin to villages or neighbourhoods... Strategies need to take account of the whole set of relationships children have which could influence their learning".
3. "Pragmatopians: are propelled by a vision of learning as a route to personal liberation and creativity but they are canny enough to know they have to deliver results."
4. Student leadership, mentoring and personalisation supports "learning where and when it is appropriate to any family in the town and to change aspirations and ambitions to learn", alongside collaborative "shared curriculum around key competencies and social skills such as self-management, collaboration, teamwork and creativity."
5. Critically, it is the timing, pacing, settings, styles, aims and technologies for learning that need to be renewed.
6. Participation, being cared for, recognition and motivation for individuals stem from learning networks with schools as community hubs that support enhanced personal and communal learning.
7. "The school leadership provided an igniting sense of purpose to propel innovation and encourage managed risk taking to develop new approaches... That kind of ‘igniting purpose’ is vital when innovation is such a highly collaborative, cumulative endeavour, which relies on mobilising and motivating staff, pupils, parents, partner agencies, other schools... Collaborative innovation relies on the participants having a strong shared sense of purpose.
   Innovation stems from the combination and recombination of ideas... The most fruitful source for these new combinations are often ideas that come from the ‘margins’ and are then applied in the ‘mainstream’... Innovators have to create a ‘change wedge’ [UGH!?!?] – enough resources to allow them to plan, develop and experiment with new approaches...
   Capacity for innovation must be built up across the school, especially among teachers."
   

Leadbeater's 21 ideas start on p. 52. I especially like his take on:

• emotional resilience in learning [do we do this in HE?];
• peer-mentoring [the power of stories we trust and relate to is huge];
• personalisation that leads to ownership of learning [feeding forward into personal development, not wasting time on meaningless data];
• schools and HEIs as productive, rooted, situated enterprises;
• community-based learning and engagements/spaces between formal and informal contexts;
• devolved leadership.
  

So much of Leadbeater's work offers hope for movement towards an inclusive curriculum that connects formal education to informal opportunities, and that does not prioritise types of knowing. Equally so much is person-centred and echoes the strands of the Early Years Foundation Strategy. As he argues:

"Relationships for learning would promote learning all over, all the time, in a wide variety of settings, from a wide range of people. Pupils would have more say and more choice over what they could learn, how, where and when, from teachers, other adults and their peers. Learning would be collaborative and experiential, encouraging self-evaluation and self-motivation as the norm.

"What is on offer here is not a trendy account of alternative education. It is a deeply practical approach developed in good schools in challenging circumstances, an approach that offers a way out of the current stalemate: the attainment plateau and ingrained inequalities in outcomes and aspirations. The route to a more socially just, inclusive education system, one which engages, motivates and rewards all, is through a more personalised approached to learning. Learning with, rather than learning from, should be the motto of the system going forward: learning through relationships not systems."

Health and Life Sciences awayday

Malcolm and I led a session today at the Health and Life Sciences awayday, looking at new directions for e-Learning at DMU. There was a great mix of experiences, expectations and aspirations for the use of technology in the curriculum. Both Malcolm and I hold a position, which states that technologies should be used progressively to empower staff and students, and that the decisions about which technologies should be used need to be owned by programme teams. We also believe that these decisions should be made in negotiation with students.

However, an interesting discussion ensued with the 20 participants. The critical areas for discussion focused upon:

1. a concern that students are not reading and evaluating enough. Shafi responded to this, stating that he had used a combination of online journals and commenting through wikis to motivate students, and he used the lovely phrase "unfolding a story". This clearly connects into personalisation and ownership of a learning process, where feed-forward is as important as feedback;
2. Rob argued that getting students to read more is an aspiration with a long history of disappointment. The key is to stimulate their appetite, and the use of appropriate tools may act as motivation;
3. Simon argued that writing does not deteriorate due to online work, as long as the appropriateness of academic writing and academic literacy was highlighted by staff;
4. Peter wondered what students' experiences were prior to higher education - perhaps we need to look at BECTA and DEMOS and JISC;
5. Tilo was undertaking participative research with young people who have a culture of using these tools to engage with new ideas, and wondered how read/write Web tools might help the research process;
6. Malcolm noted that we were about to buy Penfield Hospital from the University of Huddersfield, and this virtual hospital simulation should help empower students decision-making.

This was a really useful discussion session. However, the key is for academic staff teams to understand the technologies that enhance their teaching, and their students' learning and to engage with those enhancements. In order to understand the technologies, and in order to make better decisions about them and their curriculum, targeted and focused professional development for academic teams may be the order of the day.

Charles Leadbeater

I always find it affirming when I "bump" into affirming or interesting ideas and stories - especially those that connect with my own. The Guardian Education is carrying a story about Blue Skies Learning focusing upon communities and leadership, and empowerment of learners. More liberal hand-wringing huh? But it opened up a new channel for me in the work of Charles Leadbeater who focuses upon leadership and participation and the role of the web.

I am really looking forward to his report for the Innovation Unit on the future of learing in England launched July 10th, entitled WHAT'S NEXT ? : 21 Ideas for 21st Century Education. Comment will follow...

Blade376 on Blended Learning and 21st Century Education

Well, you know, there's a nice, you know, video put together by Blade376 about his experiences at the Blended Learning Unit conference. I blogged about this last week, but Myles' vlog is part personal diary and part exploration of progressive pedagogic engagement. Now it's, you know, a long piece, but it shows you how the medium (YouTube) can be used to engage "real people with real views". The comments and community that develop around Myles' vlog and that maybe envelop his vlog shows how connections can be developed and strengthened and help users evaluate and build their own literacies.

Stick to the end, because there is a great exploration of how Web2.0 and versioning is meaningless to current digital natives - are we are trying to force 21st Century tools into our world, rather than engaging with its power for our students?

So here we are. Again. End of Pathfinder "celebration"

Back in November 2005, Heads of e-Learning attended a Town Meeting at the Higher Education Academy in York. at this meeting, we were informed that there would be a benchmarking and Pathfinder programme initiated from the debris of the UK eUniversity farrago. I was one of a limited number of people who expressed, either at the meeting or via e-mail, concerns that benchmarking meant metrics, which in turn meant measurement and effectively a new column in a league table. A central concern for me was that any focus upon metrics should be subservient to, rather than lead, our enhancement/improvement agenda. Moreover, where metrics were deployed they should be used in context by HEIs to plan and deliver enhancement.

During the implementation of Benchmarking and Pathfinder at DMU the threat of the deployment of metrics and measurements receded. I felt that we embarked upon a process of understanding our own narratives, and helping both staff and students to come to terms with 21st century technologies to enhance their learning. We formed part of a collective, participant-led agenda for change, which for me was about:

1. empowering staff and students to make good choices about the technologies they deploy;
2. learning from others; and
   
3. developing e-pedgogies that demonstrate fitness-of-purpose and fitness-for-purpose in the 21st century.

The joy of our engagement in this national project has come through meeting other practitioners and celebrating their stories. I had hoped that this would be an outcome of our Making a difference day in London yesterday. Despite being talked at for over two hours in the morning session, we did get the opportunity to engage with people who are trying to change lives at the chalk face in the afternoon.

In the morning we heard from John Selby from HEFCE, who highlighted how institutions need to think about value the money, efficiency and latterly enhancement. Now maybe he didn't mean it in that order, but that's the order in which he spoke about these issues: money and metrics first, enhancement second. Dr Selby also highlighted that the Educating Rita model of curriculum delivery was outmoded and inefficient. Sadly he did not note that the politics of Educating Rita, and the empowerment of Educating Rita and the emancipation of that student in that story show its true value, more than the resource implications of one-to-one teaching.

Dr Selby did also highlight how the sociological power of technology-enhanced learning needs, more emphasis. He hinted at a pedagogic shift; one that takes notice of complex behaviours, and thereby empowers people to make their own decisions. This, I believe, is the next step for us. How do we engage with progressive pedagogies? How do we rethink higher education that has relatively static models curriculum delivery and design, in a world that is ever more networked? Do we have a 19th-century model of education in a 21st-century world?

The afternoon was powerful and important - we talked with and learned from other projects - theworld becomes a better place at the chalkface - we need leaders who can empower us there. The afternoon was also depressing. I had a crushing sense that we were back to where we had begun in November 2005, ostensibly due to a single unchallenged comment by John McLaughlin, from DIUS. He was asked, in effect, how we could engage with senior managers within universities to embed change and move the lessons that we have learned forward. His answer was that we have to talk about students as consumers. We have to talk about students in terms of value-for-money. We have to talk about our students in terms of metrics that would deliver efficiency.

Now at the PRHE conference last week, I heard an empowering 10 minute talk from the Vice-Chancellor of Liverpool Hope University, Professor Gerald Pillay. In it, he argued for a higher education that focused upon the mind, body and spirit of our students. My thinking about what Professor Pillay had argued relegated metrics, in the form of retention and progression, and value-for-money, to a secondary means of ensuring enhancement where measures supported our staff in improving learning. When we highlight our students as consumers, we raise up the power of metrics, and relegate the mind, body and spirit of our students. We all lose something in this argument; notably, we lose the opportunity to set progressive agendas about opportunity and meaning.

Sarah Porter, from the JISC, argued clearly that we need to know our strategic plan in order to engage with our strategic managers in an effective way. However, it was left to the QAA to offer a sensible and meaningful way forward. It is totally remiss of me not to remember the name of their assistant director who was speaking, but Icannot. However, his argument was that we had "a problem with the rhetoric". He argued that we have to focus upon giving our students "something of lifelong value". A constant, persistent focus upon metrics and outcomes, where those issues define and shape the landscape of higher education, demeans the work that we do every day with our students and staff. It reduces us all to units of measurement, or to actors in a process of measurement.

So, I feel like I let myself down by not challenging Mr McLaughlin. I feel like saying to him that all of the work we have done as practitioners since 2005 has been focused upon enhancing the life chances of our students, through a process of learning from each other. It has only been about costing models, or value-for-money, or efficiency gains, where each of these has been driven by something more humane, "something of lifelong value".

Speed Read

Don't you just envy those collegues who boast about reading a whole book, or two in a day. I couldn't imagine how they could manage do it. For me perhaps cancelling-out all interuptions, meetings, lunch, family and all, whilst being drip-fed would perhaps free as much time needed in one day to finish half of the book - max. I was beginning to despair until I came across a web 2.0 tool that might be what I've been looking for; something that would make me into a super reader, a reader on steroids! Well daydreaming is also good sometimes....

Spreeder.com is a free to use service where you would typically copy and paste the desired text into a prompt window. At a click of a button, Spreeder flashes the words in sequence to you at your chosen speed removing the tendencies to subvocalise or backtrace.

Do give it a go and let me know how you get on.

[Addendum: Another good article on Speed Reading can be found here]

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