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e-Learning Lisboa 2007

Lisbon street

My task at this conference was to talk about the delightful development of e-tutors and trainers. This gave me a chance to re-read John Heron’s ‘up-hierarchy’ (don’t ask*) which when interpreted in a learning context gives strong support for offering digital creativity, inquiry-based learning and opportunity to negotiate and choose the curriculum. Delight in learning is not just an entitlement for moral reasons, but effective when seen in this way.

By the way, got completely obsessed by the suspension bridge out of my Lisbon hotel window, which constantly found its way into every photo!

*Heron, J, Feeling and Personhood: Psychology in another key. London and Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992.

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The Importance of Computing as a Specialist Subject in Schools

Naace All-Members Autumn Conference 2007

Shared a platform with Gillian Lovegrove on this topic at the Naace All-Members Conference at Cisco in Feltham. I enjoyed the relatively easy task of listing some of the arguments for computing’s contribution to the wealth of human knowledge:

  1. computing > arithmetic – it is also the engine room of the social network / Web 2.0
  2. ubiquity of knowledge management – all disciplines’ approach to knowledge is infected with computing
  3. creativity and problem solving – it provides extraordinary potential for creative and problem solving activity by making the abstract concrete
  4. concept of the human mind – ideas of the mind have interchanged with concepts of the computer throughout history
  5. historical contribution – the interrelationship with war, economy, culture and democracy
  6. tool culture drives evolution (genetic and social) – tools have been symbiotic with humanity’s evolution since the stone age and the computer is the most sophisticated and diverse tool invented

After Gillian’s points about the problems facing the subject of computing, it was most challenging to hear one member of the audience ask the question: “Could it be our fault?”. It will be interesting to see how this discussion develops in the future.

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BCS’s KIDMM MetaKnowledge Mash-up 2007 + Becta’s Harnessing Technology: Research Forum

Meta-Knowledge Mash-up 2007

A day which thoroughly overlapped two intriguing events, but I managed to make breakfast at the RSA for Becta’s Harnessing Technology: Research Forum and then skip across the road to present at the BCS KIDMM MetaKnowledge Mash-up and then back again for the wrap-up session at the end of the day back at the RSA. Diane Oblinger obligingly begged my question, she having identified as three purposes of education: Economic Wealth, Citizenship and Social Mobility. This left me with the opening to ask about the status of Cultural Enrichment and Individual Fulfilment as further aims for education, and how digital creativity might be central to delivering these aims?

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Royal College of Art Show

RCA show - design products

Platform 8:

“The Chinese Government has recently commissioned the building of more than 1600 new design colleges, with a view to ending the division between the design of an object and its production.”

This was a very small part of an astonishing show in a large tent in Hyde Park, over the road from the Royal College of Art. The students on the MA Product Design had been organised into six ‘platforms’, focii led by their tutors. The words quoted above, from the Platform 8 poster they were giving away, are fascinating in the context of Stan Ower’s work around the culture of tools and gives me food for thought as I prepare for the next Owers Lecture.

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Ultraversity Case Study

Ultraversity case study thumbnails

This is the presentation (as a PDF) I have used to promote the innovative Ultraversity project we developed and implemented in Ultralab, Anglia Ruskin University from January 2003 – December 2006. The project’s main outcome was a degree programme which is still recruiting and has had enormous success.

I have left there now, but so much of me went into it’s design and management that I have made the effort to annotate each slide so that the presentation makes more sense without me there to talk it through. The video’s are missing for now, but watch this space…

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Lifelong learning

Ultraversity graduates in conversation

In my spare time :), I am transcribing the interviews with Ultraversity graduates at the graduation ceremony in Chelmsford on November 24th 2006. Greta has done the mass of the transcribing, I am editing and very nearly finished.

It is compelling stuff:

“I just could never envisage myself here, with the degree because I always thought I wasn’t an academic”

“that is right”

“because the books didn’t mean much to me but actually reading and putting everything into work experience”

“it came alive to me. Is that what happened to you?”

“It did to me. And I think the main, the one other thing that really helped me when I was working with Ultraversity”

“was the learning journal, logging everything down and every experience”

“I still do that, do you? Do you still do that?”

“Yes, I do. It is very hard to get out of the habit and I think it is a good learning curve”

“to be able to have that and to be able to refer back, whether it’s written or whether it’s tapes or whatever. You got it there.”

“And it is a great evidence as well, isn’t it for everything you do: in workplace, home learning”

“That is right.”

These kind of remarks make me very very proud of our endeavours over the last three years.