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."

Informal learning dilemmas

just a few issues arising for me from today's conference sessions related to informal learning:

1. emergent technologies are connecting and generating more users and data, and are building capacity for informal learning. This is changing the interface between informal and formal learning. How do we support this development? How do we empower staff to accept these changes? How do we empower students to use them effectively in their learning and assessment?
   
2. how do we help staff and students make best use of emergent technologies?
3. should we help them? How do we restructure professional development to meet this need and build opportunities?
   
4. does it matter if individuals opt-out of formal learning through social networks?
5. do technologies have affordances for people with different learning styles? Are they used in different ways by different "types" of people? What of social anxiety?
6. can we use the informal nature of Web2.0 tools to enhance feedback?
7. how do we enable students to capture their informal learning formally?
8. is email a formal technology and Facebook more human? How does that impact educational relationships?
9. How does the raft of commucation channels impact upon our "contractual" relationship with our learners? If something cannot be tracked do we leave ourselves open in student grievance procedures?
   
10. If Web2.0 tools generate identities that flatten hierarchies and breed familiarity, is staff-student relationships in them a problem?
11. How do we build tasks that help students to enhance literacies using Web2.0 tools in informal contexts?
    

Informal Learning 1: my take, though I am still learning!

Not a new phenomena, as we can all infer informal learning (IL) is going on all the time. Formal learning in our setting, has a well defined programme and tools of assessment to measure if ’ learning’ has taken place. There are lots of articles on this concept and any entry can’t go without mentioning the informal learning guru Jay Cross (who widely lectures the benefits in the work place whose tones are shed in the educational setting http://learningtechnologiesconference.wordpress.com/2007/02/22/jay-cross-video-on-informal-learning/
So, it appears this concept is more at the forefront now that we are all scurrying to see what on earth our learners are up to in this age of emergent technologies. It does make you wonder who is in the driving seat! (technology! did you say). Now, are we just interested because informal learning is taking place using e-tools? If we are, we need to be, what can we learn and what do we need to be aware of. Users of these technologies are getting younger and younger and we need to be switched on (which is my way of saying aware of the trends, this does not mean we always need to follow, but our duty is to analyse and evaluate). These emergent technologies used in informal learning settings do instigate a need to look into this deeper and the ripples that they make.

Going back to the concept of informal learning , now this is nothing new here, even without these technologies learners would collaborate informally using other methods. It does come down to a matter of choice for the learner (learner styles) in how they go about studying ‘informally’ – in that sense the learner makes inferred choices as to how they go about doing these activities and thus is in charge of their own learning (PLE (personal learning environment)). To me, learning is an internal process that we do. We do need to define what attributes of informal learning that we are interested in. Personally when I was on my degree course (before VLE's), my study habits were my own whatever methods I used to achieve understanding and learning; where group work was required I worked with the group. That's my learning style. We need to be aware that we don't intrude where we are not wanted!

I’d be interested in how we go about measuring if/when informal learning (assumed non-assessed) is taking place in our setting and do we really need to if the outcome of informal learning is assessed through formal learning? Or do we need to identify which forms of informal learning can be assessed or those forms which make the learning experience more enjoyable and suitable to different learning styles? Could Wiki’s/Blogs used in online learning be defined as informal learning? Lots and lots of questions.

The role of perception of these formal/informal settings may influence the usage of which web 2.0 tools are deployed. These SNS may be perceived as more appealing for setting up the environment for informal learning as opposed to an institutional owned social setting. Who knows? Does our current platform take ‘control’ away from the learner; do we need an environment where the learner can have some control and direction? I’m interested to see to what degree we have a role in the students informal learning taking place using ‘e’ tools, as well as the characteristics of an institutional setting for promoting informal learning – what’s in it for ‘us’ and the students? By providing such a ‘environment’ are we just giving students another space or can we learn from the ‘informal learning environment’ to feed back into our ‘formal learning environment’. There has been lots of work carried out in this field and some good papers floating around.
No doubt we will be delving more into this area…what is your take?