Co-creating Open Scholarship; was a paper Nigel Ecclesfield and I wrote a year ago for ALT-C. There was a lot of interest in reflecting on what we had learnt about learning technology since ALT was founded in 1993, and this was what we addressed. We were asked to expand our original submission into a journal article which is now freely available in ALT’s open repository. There was some debate about using Boyer’s model of scholarship as a baseline but, unlike Martin Weller in Digital Scholar, we felt that Boyer’s model itself needed updating. This was because what we had learnt most from using learning technology was about the pedagogy of learning itself. Inspired by Terry Anderson’s excellent keynote at ALT-C on Open Learning and his early scoping of Open Scholarship we felt that we should provide a synthesis and propose a new model, derived from Boyer, upon which we could debate the future of scholarship. What we are attempting to do in this post is provide some supporting arguments for such a debate with the Escola de Comunicações e Artes in Sao Paulo.

Framing the debate; In 2012 there has been a lot of discussion on what has been called open learning. However this is perhaps more about the massification of learning, or rethinking mass education, and seems to be focussed on scaling up traditional learning models, and addressing the opportunities and threats of globalisation using technology, whilst keeping the same institutional and policy frameworks. I’m thinking of Udacity, Coursera and MITx amongst others, as well as MOOCs. As I discussed on my blog on Open Academic Practice I had been a teacher for 15 years before I designed technology-enhanced (blended) learning for the first time in 1997, and I immediately designed for collaboration and discussion; which are core features of learning that do not scale and so don’t interest the biggest institutions. I have been working on pedagogically related issues concerning the use of technology ever since, mostly with an informal group of researchers known as the Learner-generated Contexts Research Group. This post outlines from where our ideas about co-creating open scholarship emerged. 

Moving to networked society; for me rethinking learning, or rather unpicking how learning works when we design new educational systems using technology (or not), has to be tied into the purpose of learning. Learning is what education systems are set up to deliver and education systems are built by societies to reproduce themselves. The problem we face in designing learning in the 21st Century is that in many ways we are poised to move to a network society whilst, to use Ben Hammersley’s phrase, those who grew up in hierarchical society are in charge. Particularly since the advent of the architecture of participation provided by Web 2.0 tools, especially social networks, which are perhaps discussion platforms, we have the opportunity to rethink learning given the access to information that the internet now provides.

Here’s one we made earlier; So the idea of co-creating open scholarship emerged from a combination of practice, research, collaborations, reflections, influences, debate and design that went through many years of development. This is a short list of some of the underpinning ideas.

1. Brokering Learning; My first, pre-digital, insight into learning was that skilled educationalists, by which I mean people who have been working inside the education system long enough to meet Richard Sennett’s 10,000 hour rule, should use their skill, expertise and knowledge to broker the desire of learners to learn with the need of the education system to accredit them formally. This is best captured in this interview with me on learning by David Jennings

2. Collaborative digital learning literacies; When I first designed a blended-learning course (Information Systems in Society) using the internet I realised I needed to design part of the course to introduce learners to the new collaborative affordances of the tools, especially search and evaluation and discussion and moderation. More in this post on an Internet Model of Learning and Teaching.

3. Informal e-learning; Having built some learning resources in the 20th century – courses, intranets and a Community Grid for Learning, I was involved, some years later, in a research project to model Informal e-learning for community technology (UK online) centres. Research by LTRI  found that centres had an evolving “life-cycle” which brought in and engaged learners by having “hooks” and being welcoming collaborative environments that used technology for learning. A workshop with ALT developed a model of informal e-learning which itemised possible new responsibilities for people involved in supporting learning. We exemplified this with an interactive training centre called Silwood Cyber-Centre.

4. Community Development Model of Learning; A key dimension of the recommendations we made about modelling informal e-learning was the idea of creating a community-responsive curriculum. We found this process of designing learning curricula to meet local needs to be a key element of social inclusion and the German Digital Integration team, for whom we prepared a presentation picked up on this.

5. Learner-generated Contexts; because of this work on informal e-learning we became part of a project to develop a web resource to solve the digital divide; Cybrarian. Whilst we recommend a Facebook for Learning back in 2002 it was rejected by the UK government and eventually key people from that team formed the Learner-generated Contexts Research Group. Our belief was that web 2.0 was going to change learning with user-generated content becoming a given. We concluded that for learning to remain meaningful in the digital future it need to anticipate this and enable us to design for a coincidence of motivations leading to agile configurations, using Rose Luckin’s “Ecology of resources” as a key design element.

5. Open Context Model of Learning; The first time we managed to synthesise our ideas into a useable resource came with the presentation/paper we prepared for the launch of the OU’s Open Learn; we called it the Open Context Model of Learning which we wrote collaboratively, John Seeley Brown called it the “most exciting thing happening in England”.  This blog’s mission is to promote this concept. Our two key ideas were to, firstly rethink learning with technology without using technological terms; We did this by focussing on the related processes of cognition, meta-cognition and epistemic cognition. The second idea concerned how to design for these differing states of cognition and so we proposed the concept of the Pedagogy Andragogy Heutagogy Continuum. Thomas Cochrane used this in the redesign of the BA Product Design at Unitec, Auckland New Zealand.

6. Architecture of Participation; somewhat to the side of this ongoing development of a new post web 2.0 pedagogy we also recognised the need to redesign the institutions of learning and Nigel Ecclesfield and I have discussed this at length on the Architecture of Participation blog. We were also involved in the University Project in London from which the WikiQuals project emerged. We think that we need to design “agile institutions working across collaborative networks“.

7. Emergent Learning Model; Most recently in line with the post Bologna process desire in the EU for harmonisation of formal, non-formal and informal learning we took the opportunity to develop the Emergent Learning Model, on which the Ambient Learning City project Mosi-Along in Manchester was based. Our thinking was that the proposed harmonisation was about integrating institutions whereas we should be building on what we had learnt about learning and redesigning the processes. Consequently this argues for learner “coincidence of motivations” to come first, with content creation as important as text books, whilst accreditation becomes agile, negotiable and post-hoc (which is what WikiQuals is investigating)

Co-creating Open Scholarship; So the authors have been through a long process of designing, then re-conceptualising learning and locating it in a post-web 2.0 context and try to pick up on the best, emergent, ideas. At the core is the notion of a shared intellectual purpose that is both collaborative and socially useful. As we now have the tools to move away from hierarchical conceptions of institutions to, say, DIY models, we can deliberately design for co-creation and we can rethink the roles of those involved and the processes in which they engage. We think the purpose of co-creating open scholarship is to create open students who can themselves becomes open scholars but also be more responsive to real world problems and social needs.

Co-creating Open Scholarship; Participating in the perpetual beta of knowledge creation through the co-creation of learning creation through the co-creation of learning.

Please add comments and questions below and I will answer them.

Overview; I previously promised to write a blog post on the practicalities and way forward relating to Digital Inclusion based on upcoming events. The Curated Conversation on Digital Inclusion and, subsequently a workshop on Social Digital Research organised by UK Online Centres and held as part of Dr. Ellen Helsper’s work relating to Media Policy at the LSE. This post will pick up on some of the issues raised partly to promote awareness on Digital Day in Adult Learners Week, partly to highlight issues that a networked digital society might have to address.

At TEL (the Technology Enhanced Learning Research Programme) we have been experimenting with fresh ways of developing research-driven policy recommendations. We had tried out a series of “curated conversations” on innovation during Autumn 2011 held at the BIS Innovation Space hosted by Annabelle Simmons. They had been on Education Innovation, on Technology Innovation and on Social Innovation for a Network Society. So when Professor Jane Seale organised a research workshop for TEL on Digital Inclusion it seemed logical to hold a curated conversation, which lasts just one hour, at the end of that day.

Curated conversations had three initials inspirations. Firstly they were inspired by the collegiality of the interdisciplinary conversations that characterised the RSA Tavern Room in the eighteenth century and which pre-figured and, in part, shaped the industrial revolution. Secondly Professor Theodore Zeldin has been using a curated conversation over dinner as part of a project to stimulate engagement in deprived communities during the recession. Thirdly, and most importantly, they were inspired by Ewan MacIntosh’s development of TeachMeets five years ago as a form of condensed self-organised professional development for teachers lasting just one hour. Professor Richard Noss of the London Knowledge Lab and I had wanted to create a form of “ResearchMeet” where we could cover a wide range of concepts and discuss them in a very condensed form and produce policy recommendations as a result.

Jane Seale had just published a new pamphlet asking “What next for Digital Inclusion?”, reflecting what we had learnt about Digital Inclusion on TEL. This formed the basis for the Research Workshop, and she had highlighted three themes that needed to which set up our policy challenges; transforming technology, transforming learning and transforming teaching. These transformational challenges framed our curated conversation.

50 words from each participant are all you need for a curated conversation to work. So we asked each of our participants to summarise the one thing they thought we needed to do in order to achieve digital inclusion; more specific policy recommendations would emerge through the conversation, that is how it works. The twelve contributions revealed three shared themes to discuss;

• Ease of Technology Use
• Access and definitions
• Not just Digital Inclusion

Which then lead into us into a discussion on the social transformations that policy would have to address given Jane Seale’s three transformation challenges.

Ease of technology use was clarified by Simon Jones from CISCO who pointed out that tech companies work to Moore’s Law of a doubling of capability every eighteen months so, as technology transformation is an ongoing driver the issues were more to do with “re-designing information pathways” and enabling open innovation. The BBC suggested that the interactivity that modern learning now requires is best accessed online, perhaps suggesting that the digital realm itself is inherently inclusive. John Popham meanwhile demonstrated his argument about making technology use fun practically by showing a short BBC film about Twicket using rural broadband.

Access and definitions quickly coalesced around Barry Philips notion that we should talk about digital “technologies for life” and Jane Seale’s argument that digital technologies represent ubiquitous “technologies for humanity”. These definitions re-characterised digital inclusion positively in light of the *emerging characteristics of networked society* and this phase of discussion resonated strongly throughout the group, but James Wallbank of Access Space cautioned that context and support are critical enabling factors that need be considered and planned for.

Not just digital inclusion expanded the point about needing information pathways by highlighting that we have “multi-faceted information needs” that need to be relevant and engaged with in a supportive context, and this process generates entitlements and responsibilities. Ronan O’Beirne sees distinguishing between agency & structures enabling policy recommendations to be developed, whereas David Dickinson of Unlike Minds sees “well-being” as a more useful criterion for broadening out digital inclusion issues in society.

The debate on social transformations suggested that we’ve moved beyond information being something you looked up in a library to a focus on *multi-faceted information needs* in a *digitally driven society*. There are kaleidoscopic variations in need which are determined by individual relevance. Cristina Costa argued that inclusion needs to embrace diversity and enable individual passions to determine what talents we express and which skills we need to learn.  However diversity requires *trust* in “structures” and trust, in policy terms, cannot be achieved easily within a target-driven policy culture. If Digital Inclusion requires social transformations in order to enable access to technologies for life, then we also need to rethink how we develop policy around these formulations.

Our policy discussions concluded that “making personal sense of information is the real inclusion issue”.  We identified three ways of achieving this through the policy challenges that we were addressing and which reflect three evolving patterns of transformation;

1 Technology evolves anyway so we need to create new relationships with users (citizens) based on “participatory design on open platforms”

2 Learning evolves anayway so in an era of “flipped curriculums” like the Khan Academy we should enable “passion driven inclusive pedagogies” to characterise technology use. This might be, for example like Sugata Mitra’s Self-Organised Learning Environments, almost the polar opposite of a top-down National Curriculum.

3 Fun; technology should be chosen for the quality of fun that it enables and teachers should be allowed to express their curiosity and discover how to co-create new personal learning pathways with the learners that they are working with.

Agile policy development, as suggested by Catherine Howe (LSE) in an earlier curated conversation, may be one way of achieving these kind of policy transformations that reflect the ever-increasing diversity of a networked society.  We now live in a more agile world in which we need to learn how to grow an Internet of People, as Ben Hammersley names it, that can “access the necessary tools they need to express their humanity“.  As Ben Hammersley puts it we need to grow away from hierarchies and grow into networks and governments and policy need to make that transition urgently. This curated conversation suggests that addressing digital inclusion through fun, entitlement and diversity may help build an inclusive Internet of People.

Thanks to all those people who took part; Richard Noss, Jane Seale, Simon Jones, James Wallbank, Jenny Chapman (BBC), John Popham, Cristina Costa (Salford), David Dickinson, Ronan O’Beirne, Barry Philips, Seb Schmoller.

Introduction; In January 2012 I am taking part in two events relating to Digital Inclusion. A TEL Conference at Sheffield Hallam University run by Professor Jane Seale, building on her recent research review, and a Curated Conversation where we try and tease out possible policy outcomes.  Consequently I am writing two blog posts on digital inclusion, firstly looking at concepts and ideas, secondly looking at practicalities and ways forward.

Background; Much of the writing on this blog, and the ideas that they try to express, derive from work concerning Digital Inclusion that I have carried out in various ways during the past ten years. As I mentioned in an earlier post I taught a Unit called Information, Technology & Society in the 80s/90s in which I developed an approach to technology and social change between 1770 & 2020 called NSU; networks, services and users. For the past twenty years I have been thinking about what the lineaments of a networked digital society might look like. In 1989 I recorded my thoughts on how 2021 might be outlined using NSU thinking, and I haven’t really changed my mind since. As a consequence I have engaged directly with various forms of technologically-driven social change since around 1995; usually to do with education but often to do with citizenship. In both of these scenarios, and especially in the social contexts we operate in as citizens, Digital Inclusion has been a key issue for me.

TEL 2012; With the TEL conference on Digital Inclusion being held in Sheffield Hallam University, followed by a Curated Conversation on Digital Inclusion to look at related policy issues, I thought I would write two posts. This first one on concepts and issues identifying my underlying thinking, and a second one next week on practicalities and policies reporting back on this weeks events. Having thought about and worked on Digital Inclusion for some years I have come to some pretty radical conclusions. This is in part because I keep thinking “how will this play out in 2021” – that is how can we create a digitally inclusive future – whereas most research and policy work is about “how can we compensate for the inequalities of the past”. Well you can’t compensate for the inequalities of the past, you have to design a different future! So I will first try and answer the question “well, how did I get here?” whilst also doing some future-gazing.

Social Inclusion; Inclusion can be defined in various ways but essentially it is about setting up processes that are designed to include people back into something from which they have previously been excluded. In a sense all types of inclusion concern social inclusion because, for various reasons and in various ways, people have been excluded from something and when that exclusion impacts on their status, privileges or rights, then, in a democracy, that needs to be addressed socially. So for me discussing digital inclusion is always about discussing social inclusion. And in discussing it I mean actively addressing it not just passively measuring it. In 2001 Tim Rudd, Alan Clarke (NIACE) and myself wrote a paper for a Becta Conference on the Digital Divide, sponsored by Toshiba, which we called  “Toward a Digital Divide Metric”. We all felt that the Digital Divide was a term whose use had grown up quickly post-Web (and which to some extent Web2 in part might have been a solution) but hadn’t been usefully defined, let alone seen as a dynamic and ever-changing issue. To their credit ORACLE wanted to sponsor work on this, through their CSR, but by time they were ready to talk in 2003 (which I should have built upon) I had a better idea; let’s define solutions not problems! Ever since I have wanted to be in the solution-space not the problem-space where social inclusion is concerned.

Getting ahead of Technology-Push; Having started back in 1989 with a conceptual view of what a society shaped by new digital networks might look like in the future, my interpretive framework ever since has been forward-facing and culturally-grounded, whereas many commentators have been trapped in an analytical approach based on a technology-push model. “Oh wow, here is this completely unpredictable technology and it will change everything we do”; well perhaps, maybe, yeah. One way of moving beyond a deterministic technology-push views of social change, which can only ever be reactive, is to use a longer run conceptual model, like NSU, to create interpretive, or even development, frameworks through which the impact of new technology can be viewed. Of course not all new technologies fit into pre-existing interpretive frameworks. As I said in Untangling the Web “technologies don’t change society, they create first-order effects”. It is what users do with technologies, particularly cumulatively as well as the cumulative effects of multiple technology change, like Web 2.0, which changes society, and we need to respond to these changes and how we view them if we want to be socially inclusive in our actions and behaviours.

Frameworks anticipating technology-push; So how might we create future-facing and interpretive frameworks which helps us get ahead of technology-push? Well, in part, that is what this blog is about and will continue to address. Since 2002, when I was asked to develop a Digital Divide Content strategy for the DfES and I realised, thanks to the research work of LTRI and my fellow community learning collaborators, that the Digital Divide isn’t solved by simply accessing the right content, I have been looking at broader issues relating to context. One of our first findings was that we need to develop content-creation tools (such as Bernie Dodge’s WebQuests) so that trusted intermediaries can create  resources that are fit for context. Digital inclusion can be  addressed by creating the right context-responsive tools; we need tools that are enabling not distancing. However addressing this is more complex than we first thought and we have developed that initial research and it finding in five differing ways;

i) Community Development Model of Learning; where we took the lessons of the LTRI research and tried to develop a tool kit, or sorts. The socially-excluded weren’t evil-shirkers who avoided learning they just didn’t understand how curriculum-driven achievement-oriented learning worked. They wanted interest-driven learning that served a purpose in the context in which they lived; we called it a community-responsive curriculum. We think that you can design for that using both new technology and new conceptual models which we have tried to provide.

ii) Open Context Model of Learning; A key way that our thinking became post “technology-push” was the work we did on the Open Context Model of Learning. As a group of people who had developed a social network for learning and had it rejected in 2003 we realised we need to re-conceptualise how learning in a socially-networked “open” world might exist. We needed a model of learning that could work in multiple contexts not just in existing institutions, and also we needed to make sure that it wasn’t defined by technology use. To that end we developed the PAH Continuum in which we redefined a teacher as a professional who enabled learning in others. Thomas Cochrane aligned this with the concept of teaching as being organised around an intentional Community of Practice who purposefully worked together to transform teaching.

iii) Architecture of Participation; participatory and inclusive processes just don’t develop in hierarchical institutions, organisations need to develop adaptive qualities so that they can respond to and enable new forms of engagement. Universities are spectacularly bad at this and education systems are designed to recreate hierarchies. We need to learn how to design “Adaptive Institutions working across Collaborative Networks” at the organisation level if we want inclusion to be built into our institutions.

iv) Emergent Learning Model; We also found that once our thinking about learning embraces a post-curriculum model and engages with post-institutional context then it allows emergence to appear as we can focus on the social processes of learning. This then allows us to design education systems in completely differently and to design in digital, and social, inclusion from the very outset. The projects Ambient Learning City and WikiQuals are testing out the new possibilities offered by emergent thinkin; see the #mosialong Aggregate then Curate model for example.

v) Digital Practitioner; Recent work (2011) on the digital practice of teachers in FE Colleges, captured in this presentation, has revealed both teachers’ practical curiosity at how digital technologies might be used to support their practice and the learning it engenders, and the link between personal use of new technology and their own professional development. It seems that in 2012 social changes in the use of technology for personal use are now as likely to drive changes in teaching practice as formal staff development, or Initial Teacher Training.

Inclusion, social inclusion, digital inclusion, digital identity; I have further points to make on differing between modes of inclusion today as we are moving into a phase when our Digital Identities become increasingly a key part of our public persona in society but I will pick up issues to do with Digital Identity in another post. Suffice to say that digital identity is the next critical domain in which issues of digital inclusion will play out, as our effectiveness in society will depend on having effective digital identities which we can make secure from identity theft.

What is Digital Inclusion; So to define digital inclusion then, for me, requires us from the very outset to look at the nature of the emerging networked digital society around us and to decide on how we can design the social processes, institutions and technology uses that enable us to define our future through the emergent use of enabling technologies. In this way we will be designing digital inclusion into the society we are building, rather than examining why digital exclusion is rampant and why every new bit of kit creates a new problem to be addressed as a part of an ever-changing, and increasing digital divide.

Digital Inclusion Practicalities and Policy; I will examine more practical issues of how we might achieve this, rather than these more conceptual ones, in more detail next week, also in the context of the issues that concern this blog (open, context, participation). However I would commend Jane Seale’s recent TEL research publication on “What next for Digital Inclusion” as a starting point for framing how we might addressing digital inclusion practically. In this she helpfully clarifies three key challenges, which we need to address as we move forward in 2012.;

Digital Inclusion Challenge 1: The Transformation of technologies How can we design and develop new technologies to help excluded learners?

In this context I think the NSU model is really helpful ; I also think we need to write a constitution for the society we want to build as I describe in Homi & the NEXT One.

Digital Inclusion Challenge 2 : The Transformation of learning how can technologies be used to transform the learning experiences and outcomes of excluded learners?

I think the Emergent Learning Model provides a way of transforming learning, and helps us identify the new problems we need to solve.

Digital Inclusion Challenge 3: Transformation of teaching how can technologies be used to transform inclusive teaching practices?

I think the PAH Continuum (and the Craft of Teaching) have ideas on this, Thomas Cochrane’s Intentional CPD and the related issues of professional development we have been discussing in the Digital Practitioner.

I look forward to how this debate can be developed and expanded this week and will report back on our discussion next week.

This is a blog post version of the paper “Towards a framework for co-creating Open Scholarship” by Fred Garnett, and Nigel Ecclesfield given as a paper at ALT-C 2011 published in the Proceedings and freely available in their open Access repository. The shorter slide presentation is on Slideshare. This post includes the arguments as to how we might develop Boyer’s Model of Scholarship in the digital age towards an open model of learning by developing his arguments about Discovery, Integration, Application and Teaching, to include Co-creation. It is a ‘modest proposal’ not the finished article. However it develops our long-term thinking that digital learning is not a subset of old models of learning but a superset of ideas that are capable of transforming our understanding about, and the practice of, learning.

Introduction;  A recent edition of ALT-J made a call for papers that looked at ‘theoretical approaches in digitally mediated environments’. A key part of this call was to use the Boyer Model of Scholarship (Boyer 1997) as a frame of reference upon which to base such new theoretical approaches. The authors felt that there were limitations to this, perfectly valid, model which could be addressed in light of the recent moves to develop a model of Open Scholarship (Anderson 2009), and other theories reflecting the ‘networked age’, such as Caroline Haythornthwaite in New Forms of Doctorate (2009) and our own Open Context Model of Learning and the Pedagogy, Andragogy, Heutagogy (PAH) Continuum (Luckin et al. 2010).

Our concern with Boyer’s Model lies in the fact that it suggested a separation between researchers, who ‘build new knowledge through traditional research’ and teachers who ‘study teaching models and practices to achieve optimal learning’. Boyer usefully identifies four ‘Types of Scholarship’, those of Discovery, Integration, Application and Teaching (DIAT), but arrogated the responsibility for ‘creative work in established fields’ solely to Discovery scholarship (the ‘traditional researcher role’). Furthermore this model also implies a linear flow concerning how new knowledge becomes a part of teaching, which suggests that the type of teaching that results is more instructional. In our opinion this reveals a perhaps limited view of how pedagogies, both existing and emerging, might be deployed by an experienced teacher.

The Learner-Generated Contexts Research Group has been concerned to develop a co-creation approach to learning and consequently find this separation curious. We would argue that using the PAH Continuum, in ways described by, for example, Cochrane in Exploring mobile learning success factors(pdf - 2010a), enables more flexible approaches to learning and teaching by using a mix of the PAH Continuum which also allows for a wide range of technology uses across different years of learning. This also changes the teacher’s relationship to ‘research’ through the development of ‘epistemic cognition(pdf)’ in the learner (Avramides and Luckin 2007), or action research strategies (Cochrane 2010b).

Inspired by the Open Scholar movement, we shall look at how we might both:

(1) apply a co-creation of learning approach to Boyer’s model,

(2) make the four-stage process more iterative and less discrete.

In so doing we will propose a framework for the ‘Co-creation of Open Scholarship’ as a way of taking forward the strengths of each of the models under review as we perceive them in 2011. We will do this by examining each ‘type of scholarship’ in Boyer’s DIAT model through reviewing the descriptors in detail before adding an additional type that we will propose calling ‘co-creating’. We hope therefore in this paper to re-examine the notion of scholarship in the age of social media, update our view of learning theory in light of the developments of learning technology and deepen our views of the notion of co-creation in learning and research in the emerging ‘networked society’.

Background; Marta Nibert (2001) in her analysis of Boyer’s modelling of the professional role of the academic within American ‘college faculty’, in their terms specifically the ‘professoriate’, explains that for both her and Boyer the concern is with defining ‘scholarly pursuits’ with a ‘balanced focus on all forms of scholarship necessary to meet the demands of the information age’. The beauty of Boyer’s model is indeed this clarity; its limitations are that it perfectly describes a situation that had validity over a decade ago, since when we have had thorough-going changes, often in response to the aforementioned ‘demands of the information age’. These are mostly around notions relating to the various concepts of ‘Open’ ideas that were not available to Boyer and Nibert. However Boyer’s use of a clear structure of ‘types’ of scholarship, and the use of descriptors to define the related actions of professionals, enables the kind of discussion and review we are undertaking here. For reference we are calling this the DIAT structure;

Discovery; the traditional researcher role,

Integration; focusing on making connections across disciplines,

Application; focusing on using research findings and innovations to remedy societal problems,

Teaching; which Boyer considers a central element of scholarship.

This provides a useful framework from which to review scholarship in the more ‘Open’ era of 2011. The DIAT model offers clear descriptors within each type of Scholarship and also defines what constitutes a scholarly career whilst attempting to create some balance of recognition across the phases of scholarship described. Full table of Boyers Model of Scholarship here.

Open Scholarship in a network society; Terry Anderson’s discussion of Open Scholarship was given as a keynote talk at the ALT-C Conference (2009) as part of a broader discussion of trends in learning and technology practices in the twenty-first century. He talks of moving from Communities of Practice to Networks of Practice, arguing that ‘we are all in the change business’, capturing the sense of flux that we are now trying to analyse here.

Caroline Haythornthwaite in New Forms of Doctorate (2009) also discusses the impact of network effects on learning and scholarship. Building on the Taxonomy of the Many (Dron and Anderson 2008) Anderson looks at how learning is moving from the group to the collective, challenging Boyer’s institution-centric approach. Anderson argues for a move to being an Open Scholar arguing that quality scholarship ‘is peer and public reviewed, accessible, persistent, syndicated, commented and transparent’ picking up on how the network effects of learning are being impacted upon by a range of social media, both generic and also dedicated to scholarly practice.

Anderson additionally sees a key function of Open Scholarship as being ‘empowering learners as future teachers’. Haythornthwaite amplifies this by defining ‘learning is a relation that connects people’, emphasising the relational and networked qualities of learning. Anderson is focusing on the affordances of learning in the emerging world of Open Learning and examining its possibilities, whereas Boyer is looking at how professional scholarship can be embedded institutionally, whilst broadening its value by re-asserting the value of teaching, for example. Haythornthwaite (2009) looks more deeply and precisely at the effects that a range of networks are having educationally and sees the future as being characterised by ubiquitous learning in society. So we have three approaches, respectively focusing on

a) institutions and professionalism,

b) open learning and social media,

c) ubiquitous learning and network effects.

Boyer is concerned to clarify the current role of professional scholarship within institutions whilst Anderson is arguing from a scholarly perspective for a move to a deeper view of networks as collectives, occurring simultaneously within and outside institutions. Haythornthwaite takes the rise of networks as a given and discusses learning in the ‘networked age’. Indeed she prefers to see learning as an epiphenomenon of networks, with technology as a critical enabler of this or, as she puts it, ‘technology is a mediator for network relations including the vital relation of learning’ in a networked society. She sees learning as a networked relation consisting of learning relations, production, outcomes and spaces in an emerging participatory culture (pace Jenkins 2006).

Indeed, Haythornthwaite sees ‘contributory, open and participatory practices’ as signifying trends in learning which signify the ‘emergent work’ that ‘teachers, learners, educators and researchers’ should currently be engaging in. She draws her work together more coherently, as a summative social vision of future learning in a networked society, than Anderson. However Anderson is more discursive in his observations on Open Scholarship flagging a range of emergent practices which an Open Scholar might respond to, into which he adds Personal Learning Environments and social learning, amongst many others. He quotes Gideon Burton ‘the Open Scholar is someone who makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible and who invites and encourages ongoing criticism of their work and secondary uses of any or all parts of it at any stage of its development’.

For Anderson, being an Open Scholar represents a new type of education work which maximizes: Social learning, Media richness, Participatory and connectivist pedagogies, Ubiquity and persistence, Open data collection and research processes and Creating connections.  However for Anderson the sine qua non of this process is the production of Open Education Resources (OER), which is perhaps both a little reductive and limiting on how we might usefully characterise being an Open Scholar. As ‘change agents for the future’ Open Scholars are both ‘empowering learners as future teachers’, and also inducting their charges into being Open Students, which we read as the inter-generational work of developing co-creative practices in learning.

So Anderson’s work is concerned to identify a range of cutting-edge scholarly practices without fully detailing how they might be embedded within the institution, but perhaps with more of an emphasis on Gideon Burton’s notion of their ‘ethical value’. Haythornthwaite, however, is concerned to identify the emerging affordances of a range of networks and how that might affect ubiquitous learning within society.

Boyer however is interested in the professional role of the researcher within an institutionalised ‘professoriat’. Our interest here is in how we might synthesise these approaches, starting with the PAH Continuum as a model of co-creation that might prove useful.

PAH Continuum This is part of the Open Context Model of Learning (Luckin et al. 2010), and like Anderson and Haythornthwaite, it is cognisant of the affordances of new, networked, web 2.0 and later technologies for learning and is consequently designed to enable their emergence within the practices of teaching and learning.

We have argued in the Open Context Model of Learning that the PAH Continuum allows for a teaching and learning process to be developed which delivers good subject-based learning, the prime concern of educational policymakers, whilst enabling collaborative learning strategies and creative forms of assessment to be deployed. Cochrane has demonstrated how this might be done using mobile technologies on the Product Design degree at Unitec, NZ (Cochrane 2010a) by incorporating it into the design of technology use, and into supporting the increasing self-management of learners. So we believe the PAH Continuum helps in incorporating open learning affordances and networked effects into institutional contexts, given appropriate institutional-readiness (Cochrane 2010b).

Developing Boyer’s types of scholarship; So let us look at how we might review Boyer’s four types of scholarship in light of the approaches mentioned earlier, inspired variously by social media, digital tools, open learning and network effects.

Discovery;  For Boyer this is the phase of scholarship where new knowledge is built through traditional research. Whilst this is a reasonable description of subject-based research where new knowledge about say plant cells can be discretely studied and identified, it is less relevant to learning/interdisciplinary research. What it clearly identifies is how new knowledge that will be used in subject-based teaching will be determined. So for the moment we will leave the descriptors relating to Discovery as one type of scholarship unchanged as that is not our immediate concern. However, we will review them at the end of the article as part of considering how we might develop scholarship as an ongoing iterative process, after examining the whole of Boyer’s DIAT model.

Integration; The Integration phase of Scholarship in Boyer moves beyond the professional orientation of the traditional researcher, as described in the Discovery phase, to look at a narrowly defined notion of an ‘interpretation of knowledge’, including descriptors of practice and also with a focus on the production of learning materials. These are identified very practically, as literature reviews, textbook creation and course design, but somewhat traditionally. This ignores developments coming from the Learning Technology community over the past 15 years as described by, for example, Conole and Alevizou (2010) and the newer affordances of social media and its network effects (Haythornthwaite 2009). In our view, literature reviews themselves have also been supplemented by data mining techniques using a range of social media tools (Kelly 2011) A number of groups are also examining digital research practice in the age of social media and are producing fresh taxonomies in this field from the librarian’s perspective (British Library 2011). More importantly the process of learning content production is being transformed rapidly, most notably by the OER and Open Courseware (OCW) movements, so much so that Anderson in particular sees this as a key descriptor of being an Open Scholar. Additionally we are seeing a number of syllabus-free approaches to learning, such as those proposed by Sugata Mitra (2009) and Ian Cunningham (2005), who separate learning content from learning process, something Cochrane has also developed this using the PAH Continuum in course design (Cochrane 2010a). A more complex dimension is that of enabling ‘network relations’ (Haythornthwaite) to ‘emerge’, which might mean allowing new social groupings to emerge around new contexts, as suggested in the Emergent Learning Model (Garnett 2010), or by enabling ‘flocking’ (Dron and Anderson 2008). This suggests that we need an approach reflecting the divergent design of resources for appropriation and use in multiple contexts, rather than a convergent design process concerned with educational instruction within an institution. An integration phase of scholarship might be better served by a process of enabling knowledge to be opened out by networked effects and used in a more inter-disciplinary way in a range of contexts.

Application;  In the ‘Application’ type of scholarship Boyer’s looks for the external validation of the scholar through the application of their knowledge in other communities. Whilst this is certainly a valuable social process, we would rather the research professional started with developing their professional communities of practice through a collaborative mentoring process, as described by Cochrane (2010a) in his description of educational communities of practice as course teams. Whilst becoming sufficiently expert as professionals to be able to advise industry and government is clearly of value to the scholarly academic, and also to their host institution, a broader notion of public engagement should also be considered as we move to a more networked society, with more of a peer-to-peer focus (Shirky 2008) and away from the more traditional notion of institution to institution linkages to promote the career of one individual. This is closer to what Dron and Anderson call the ‘Taxonomy of the Many’ (2007) shifting the range and character of institutional linkages whilst adding in concerns with public engagement of HE Institutions as they evolve (NCCPE 2009). The collaborative affordances of social media mean that possible new, networked effects (new partnerships, institutional models, new models of learning and teaching, new modes of innovation) need to be positively designed for institutionally, enabling what Garnett and Ecclesfield (2008) call ‘adaptive institutions working across collaborative networks’. So Boyer’s institutional descriptors in ‘Application’ need to be broadened beyond direct linkages just with industry and government, both of which are going through their own transformations anyway in the post web 2.0 world (Enterprise 2.0 and Gov 2.0). They need to be made adaptive, to be reflective of a broader range of stakeholder interests (as developed in the recent JISC Curriculum Development and Design initiatives 2010) and also to incorporate community responsibilities and ethical approaches, like those defined by Michael Gurstein concerning Community Informatics (2007)

Teaching;  We feel that the existing descriptors in the Type ‘Teaching’ mostly reveal how little Boyer’s model reflects the range of transformations in scholarly practice effected by learning technologies and social media in recent years. This might best be exemplified in the five-year-old self-organised TeachMeet programme (2006). Again, whilst this has the merit of clarity in how it describes teaching responsibilities, the descriptors have been overtaken by events. For a start it is now not unusual to link together the processes of learning and teaching, and not just in Vygostky-based constructivist approaches, so it is impossible to discuss this Type without incorporating a greater degree of issues concerning learning and the role of the student, thus capturing the more participative approaches to education that have been emerging in recent years (Anderson 2009; Conole and Alevizou 2010; Cochrane 2010a).

In order to reflect this we have added the descriptor ‘Teaching as a reflective and dialogic practice promoting learning’, which also mirrors the work we have done on developing the PAH Continuum in the ‘Craft of Teaching’ (Ecclesfield and Garnett 2010). This more dialogic approach to teaching and learning as practice means that the notion that a teacher would merely ‘study’ a pre-defined approach to teaching in the classroom has been replaced by the potential for more andragogic, or negotiated, approaches to the process of learning. As Mitra (2009) has shown, resources can now be introduced from a range of contexts via the Internet so teachers need to be capable of ‘brokering’ learning (Jennings 2010) as resources can be introduced on the fly within the learning process by learners themselves. As Anderson indicates, learners now have personal learning networks extending beyond their immediate learning environment, so teaching needs to be capable of negotiating a range of learning contexts.

Co-creating;  Finally we look at the proposed additional ‘type of Scholarship’, that of cocreating. A key phrase in O’Reilly’s description of Web 2.0 (2005) is that it is in ‘permanent beta’ which might be highlighted as a factor in why some teachers resist new approaches to teaching, but which has transformed the way we now view a range of processes. We would argue that we are now in a world in which knowledge creation itself is in permanent beta, what Weinberger describes as Everything is Miscellaneous (2008), or the ‘post-digital disorder’. Consequently the notion of a linear process of knowledge creation with knowledge discovery as the role of researcher and knowledge transmission as the role of the teacher, as separate scholarly practices, has been replaced by a more fluid and dynamic process which we are only just beginning to understand. The emerging knowledge networks are no longer something about which we receive information from researchers, they are processes in which practitioners participate, and we need to design scholarship practices that reflect this. The dynamic outline of Open Scholarship that Anderson has presented (2009) provides an insight into the ethical issues in developing this approach, whilst also indicating the ongoing range of initiatives in development that support an Open Scholarship approach, which will need to be adapted to as their mature and prove their scholarly value. Haythornthwaite’s more synthetic vision of scholarly practice anticipates some of the cultural shifts that might change that practice in more participatory, networked societies.

We see these as differing ways of addressing the positive aspects of the emerging ‘permanent beta’ world of knowledge resources and knowledge creation, but what we are trying to do here is to evolve the traditional notions of scholarship in light of these emerging theories of teaching and learning, post web 2.0, and integrate the worlds of scholarship, along with teaching and learning to reflect the changing qualities of knowledge in a networked world where the ubiquity of social media is a quality that also challenges our traditional notions of academic institutions. We think the essence of this lies in the notion of co-creating learning and so we have added this as an additional type of Scholarship, namely ‘Co-creating’.

We see the dimensions of this new view of scholarship emerging from the process of engaging in collaborative peer-to-peer networks, which would also practice interdisciplinary approaches, which might also be disruptive of existing subject disciplines. This disruptive quality is what we describe as heutagogy and we have indicated how that can be deployed in the learning and teaching process in the PAH Continuum (Luckin et al. 2010). The PAH Continuum is a framework of teaching and learning that allows for epistemic cognition to emerge by co-creating learning, and it is through epistemic cognition that new knowledge can be forged (Avramides and Luckin 2007),

Reviewing discovery;  The discussion of the co-creation of Open Scholarship presented here, where we have also presented a deeper notion of the role of the co-creation of learning together with the learner, or the Open Student as Anderson puts it, also enables us to incorporate epistemic cognition into the learning process. However the inclusion of epistemic cognition also changes the description of Discovery as a type of scholarship because epistemic cognition, within the co-creation process described in the PAH Continuum, is capable of stimulating research agendas within the learning process. In which case we might wish to redefine Discovery as the ‘co-creation of research agendas’. So that Discovery as a type of scholarship might be better described.

Conclusion;  So through examining Boyer’s traditional approach to scholarship and by contrasting it to a range of emerging practices, admittedly driven by new web and social technologies and the early responses of Anderson in his reflections on Open Scholarship, and Haythornthwaite in her reflections on networked societies, we believe that we can outline a framework in which a co-creation model of scholarship can be developed and recognised professionally. What is presented here is merely a proposed outline, which we hope will be discussed, torn apart and further developed.  For now here is our proposition of what a co-creation model of Open Scholarship might look like in light of the above discussion.

Caveat

We have not discussed many new pedagogies, such as Connectivism in this article, nor new approaches to scholarship, such as e-science or Technology-Enhanced Research. This is not because we think they have nothing useful to say: obviously they do. However, our starting point was to find a bridge between Boyer’s Model of Scholarship and Open Scholarship whilst taking account of relevant work, concerning the co-creation of learning. This then lead to a broadening out of the debate and the references used such that this might appear as an overview of networked learning theories, which it is not. We view this as perhaps the start of process of discussion and would obviously welcome the views of for instance Siemens (2005) and Downes (2005) from both their Connectivist and E-learning 2.0 perspectives, amongst many others.

References

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Last Week I asked; what have we learnt from Web-enabled Education? Has the Web begun to enable more learning-centred approaches? Have we used the affordances of new technology to improve our learning, lives and society? This was in answer to @aleksk on Untangling the Web observation who said she would focus on ‘pedagogical theories, online education enablers, novel learning techniques and approaches that the web affords’. In fact her brief article in todays Observer disappointingly focusses on university research issues, a customary mistake by academics and policy-makers. Shockingly she quotes the complacent Hamish MacLeod (who he?) at Edinburgh “I wouldn’t say there are any profound changes in the way we should be thinking about theories of learning”. I beg to differ! So let’s look a little more inclusively at what the web has afforded us for learning.

What have we learnt from Web-enabled Education; in terms of pedagogical theories, online education enablers, novel learning techniques and approaches as Aleks Krotoski asked? Well last week as I argued that in ‘untangling the web on education’ we are only taking a fifteen-year snapshot of a 50-year process of social change. Picking out the educational consequences of the web is a small and partial view of a broader ongoing set of social processes. Primarily we can say that the web has resulted more in changes to the processes of learning than in changes to the nature of the institutions of education; the consequences of the web on those institutions are yet to be fully realised.

However in terms of pedagogy there can’t have been a richer 15-year period since books were permanently unchained from University libraries 500 years ago. During this time we have moved from theories of knowledge transmission to models of the co-creation of learning (partly by putting context into knowledge). We can identify discussion groups, communities of practice, collaborative learning, formative assessments, open learning, social learning, learning design, participatory learning, co-creation and knowledge creation, amongst areas of pedagogic change. The Machine is Us/ing Us but we are both a complicit and dynamic element in that process. As James Dalziel says we need to use pedagogy to design the technology, which has increasingly been the case in the past ten years.

In terms of online education enablers, we have seen a shift from Access to Content to Context; in the 1990s access to the Internet was the major concern, followed by distributed virtual learning environments (coming out of an instructionally-based training tradition and so qualitatively different to the learning pedagogies that come from distributed networks), resource exchanges (FERL) and Communities of Practice (TeachMeet), Open Course Ware initiatives, folksonomies and cloud-based aggregators. We now Like+1 being Digital by Default in emerging social personalised networks. Whilst GLOW in Scotland (driven by their Curriculum for Excellence) are doing interesting things in the managed learning environment world, if you read the work of Graham Attwell, or Su White you could describe the last fifteen years as seeing a move from VLE’s (which themselves moved from rigid classrooms in the sky to the contextualised drag & drop constructions of Moodle) to Personal Learning Networks. In this world there is an ‘ecology of resources‘ available differentially for learning, depending on how you set the institutional ‘filters’, as Rose Luckin and her doctoral students have been mapping out. The work of George Siemens (Connectivism), Stephen Downes (e-learn 2.0) Caroline Haythornthwaite (New forms of doctorates), and others, all theorise these possible learning changes in profound terms, leading to MOOCs #ds106 and more distributed fireside models of learning.

Since Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms, LOGO programming and the Year of IT (1984) when the BBC Micro was launched we have had a range of novel learning techniques and approaches, all of which in some way might be seen as growing out of the sixties Home Brew Computer Club and Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib.  Diana Laurillard’s great book Rethinking University Teaching (1993) almost pre-dated the web but was already investigating new approaches to education that new media and new theories offered, around concepts of conversational scaffolding. The Web allowed many earlier niche theories on Computer-Mediated Communication  and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning approaches to develop and be adopted, and many new technologies further enable novel learning techniques and approaches. Most significant of all perhaps might be Bernie Dodge’s discovery that ‘browsing is learning’ and his creation of WebQuests as a result; which the School of Everything has extended in part. Perhaps the most obvious one is mobile learning which, as Mike Sharples puts it, disruptively brings informal learning into the formal environment of the classroom. Now, with the rise of smart phones, mobiles become a multi-function tool accessing a range of resources on the move which can now become context-responsive. Meanwhile a generation brought up on games will be expecting immersive learning experiences and whilst Second Life has proved limited, World of Warcraft has had a profound effect. Many games now provide toolkits for developers to embed learning and in the UK places like Dundee and John Moores Universities provide degrees in Digital content creation of various kinds. As smart phones get smarter and the cloud becomes the new platform for apps further novelty and new pedagogical challenges are promised.

What NeXT; Whilst the mainstream education system gets ever-more individualised, elitist, costly and socially divisive, thus mirroring the fragmented society it is design to promote, web-enabled learning gets more participative, discursive and open, driven by the elaboration of the digital paradigm Kondratieff predicts will last until 2021; more and deeper change is coming. The discourse between those promoting hierarchical social division and those enabling participative socialised learning will determine whether we will have either a double-dip society, or a revitalised one based on participative democracy, fuelled by ‘adaptive institutions working across collaborative networks’. The web can enable that by letting informal learning drive education. What we can say is that networks and digitisation have changed learning, what we havent yet seen is the full working out of the consequences of that change across the education system, let alone us.

Only such a thing as Society will let us know if our education system is any good. Check the news this week to see if we have a functioning participatory society based on respect and mutuality that is in balance with its environment, if not education must and can change. However ignorant and paralysed policy makers are, hypnotized by the banker of “high-stakes assessment” at which they succeed, and in which they have invested their status, the web has enabled many wonderful ordinary people to do marvelous things with learning. The affordances of the web on learning are such that it is only social factors that block the fulsome opportunities for an inclusive. Untangling the Web on education and learning means taking decisions about the society you want to live in. In the end that is about values; more things or richer discussions?  Do you want more elitism for special people or more participation for everyone? Learning isn’t just for institutions.

Thriving in a colder and more challenging climate; As the title suggests ALT-C, Learning Technologists all, will be holding their annual conference 2011 this week and addressing the larger socio-economic context in which learning takes place. People like Gilly Salmon, with her 5-stage e-moderating model have developed responses to how CMC has changed learning, Sugata Mitra has developed the SOLE model, very much a post-web approach to learning, and @JosieFraser is working on city-wide approaches to learning. I think much will be discussed about the social consequences of the post-web  changes in learning, although I dont hold out much hope for academics addressing social justice. What will be said anew about pedagogy? Will Sugata Mitra’s SOLE become acceptable or marginalised like Learning Styles? What will be new in the world of online education and enablers, maybe it will be re-imagined with the JISC Learning Design Studio? Or are we waiting for Anya Kamenetz to report for the Gates Foundation? What novel learning techniques and approaches will be revealed? Maybe Plan Ceibal from Uruguay will reveal something novel? Maybe the corridors at tweetwalls (#altc2011) will be more discursively revealing?

What have I missed? What else has happened? Am I right that the web has helped changed learning or are Alex Krotoski and Hamish MacLead right that nothing new has happened pedagogically because of the web?  What else might cause changes in learning, education and society in the next 10 years? Are networks and digitisation key enablers of social change? Should traditional politicians welcome the Arab Spring, or worry that demand for changes in democracy might go viral? Comments welcome

If we try to untangle the impact of the web on education we can describe it as enabling a shift from a focus on education as a system to learning as a process, particularly since the web itself has become more open, social and participatory, especially since Web 2.0.  So how did we get here?

Background; I myself (@fredgarnett) started looking at the impact of the Web, indirectly, in 1984 when I began teaching a Unit called Information, Technology and Society. Deciding that taking the tropes of the Industrial Revolution and applying them to the Information Revolution was way too limited I looked instead at how the social organisation of settlements emerged out of agriculture and that from hunter-gathering; maps, flints and fires. Inspired by Yoneji Masuda and Nikolai Kondratieff, and my own observations, by 1988 I had evolved the NSU model, so-called because I think social change comes from new Networks being built, new Services being provided and new User behaviours emerging, over 50-year long-wave Kondratieff economic cycles stimulated by new technologies; the micro-chip was invented in 1971. New economies emerge from new networks of distribution. In 1989 I wrote a story to capture the changes we might see by 2021 as a Masters paper called Homi & the NeXT One (the title a tribute to Steve Jobs). Consequently I have had some understanding of the process by which new technology changes society ever since. For me the key aspect discernible over the last 250 years (especially when preceded by a knowledge revolution like the scientific revolution) are the cumulative effects of unnoticed second-order, or unanticipated, effects; hence the poverty of most predictions about the future which focus on first-order (anticipated effects) based on the knowledge of experts whose expertise is historically based.

Watching the Web Flow 1990s; Being more Utopian than dystopian I looked forward to the, then, forthcoming information revolution democratising our representative democracy, with its UK roots in the 17th Century (1689), by enabling new participatory *constitutions* to be written, redefining the social relations by which we live. Whether they be communications, networked or mash-ups, technologies don’t change society, they create first-order effects, that is consequences of what the technologies were designed to do. Social change comes from users inventing new use-states in line with their beliefs and social behaviours. Yoneji Masuda was predicting a high-mass knowledge creation society using a global-information utility in 1982, but the Internet was still hard to find in 1990 and smart phones were more than 10-years away. Nonetheless Tim Berners-Lee invented the web (1990) to help scientists share their documents and Marc Andreessen popularised the multi-media version of his World Wide Web, the browser (1993). In 1995 I wrote a first-year degree unit called Business Uses of the Internet, e-commerce not being a concept then, and one of my students wrote the first website for the Docklands Light Railway as an assignment. I also took John Cook’s first online course at TVU. In 1997 I wrote another unit, Information Systems in Society which used a ‘blended learning’ approach and now I had to write a new assignment which was designed to teach learners how to learn using the web and its new tools; discussion groups & moderation, search and evaluation, co-operation and collaboration. Then I built an Intranet for learning; web tools were changing stuff.

The Web, Learning and Policy 1997; According to Chris Yapp both John Major & Tony Blair were committed to implementing the National Grid for Learning (NGfL), a programme to put all schools in the UK on the Internet. Back in the heady technocratic days of New Labour the government had a policy for Learning Technology which was going to use the affordances of the Web, however limited, and new gurus, such as Stephen Heppell emerged. I was involved with LB Lewisham’s local roll out of the NfGL, being on the Curriculum Committee which, amazingly, was one of the few local authority committees that actually looked at the uses of the NGfL rather than just being concerned to put the boxes and wires into the schools. Thanks to the amazing Gill Deadman and the ever-inventive Dominic Clare, we put together a staff development plan and bid for NOF-funding to build a Community of Practice (COP) based Community Grid for Learning (CGfL). Incidentally of the 40 programmes funded by NOF only 2 of them (TaLENT & UNL) knew what they were doing; the Open University’s web-training, for example, was a low-cost disgrace – they just sent videos to teachers; many of them didn’t even untangle the tape.

Community Learning 2000; In Lewisham we also had a big EU-IST project, GALA, and the borough was pro-active in addressing Information Society concerns, starting the Citizen Connects project in 1998 (then London Connects) which was designed to look at the issues affecting citizens in the emerging digital economy. Having worked on local community projects for 3 years I applied for and became Head of Community Programmes at Becta working on the national £250m Community Access to Lifelong Learning (CALL) programme with NOF & the DCMS. When I arrived at Becta in the UK we had the NGfL for schools, FERL for FE, learndirect for work-based learning, UK online for community learning, NOF-DIGI for digitising cultural content with Culture Online a possible twinkle of new experiences; and the BBC had finally got BBCi right. Becta’s Lifelong Learning team actually brought in experienced practitioners from colleges & community learning to develop both learning objects, resource exchanges and CGfLs. Universities had JISC, CETIS and UKOLN, whose Web Focus under @briankelly has been providing Web-advice for learning since 1996. Bodies like ALT were pro-actively promoting the profession of Learning Technologists; we were making the future, heady days, and the educational promise was immense.

Web 2.0 and a Facebook for Learning; Foot and Mouth killed Culture Online but O’Reilly gave us the vision of Web 2.0, more powerful than the dot.com boom which had been about people who didn’t understand the Internet trying to make big bucks quick out of it (now there’s an old and deadly business model –  we need to ease a quantity of bankers out of the economy even now). O’Reilly’s big idea was that in the future the web would be a platform, not a destination, where we would be capable of doing everything, collaboratively and participatively. This pissed off Oxbridge elitists like Andrew Keen but delighted people like me who were charged with developing socially inclusive models of learning and felt the future was a place we could build. Around this time I was asked by the DfES to develop a Digital Divide Content Strategy, yep we believed we could fight social injustice with content back then. We commissioned some research from LTRI, aided by an Advisory Group of community technologists (like Ian Harford, Malcolm Forbes and the inimitable Ronan O’Beirne). We quickly realised that content isn’t king (we now believe #contextisqueen) as inclusion is about process. I was also involved in designing a social network for learning which was rejected by the DfES who didn’t/don’t get Web 2.0, which kicked off our Open Context work. However we did identify some key digital inclusion findings; you need interest-driven learning as well as content-creation tools for the dynamic creation of content, a community-responsive curriculum which allowed centres to develop a responsive ‘life-cycle’. Altogether these create the Community Development Model of Learning. Eight years before the UK riots we recommended linking learning and Community Development. Instead the National Curriculum results just keep on getting better, to the ongoing delight of educational policy-makers, so why fix what isn’t broken?

Modernising Government 2005; Publicly we reached a kind of peak in web-enabled education in the UK at the time of Tony Blair’s last election (2005), which was blighted by his record on Iraq and saddled with a paucity of vision which seem to say markets can solve everything, now that we have fully re-invested in UK infrastructure (sic). Web-wise the vision was focussed on the Digital Switchover (2012), and the head of the relevant parliamentary sub-committee said that media-literacy was all about (wait for it) using the red button on the TV remote! Wi-fi and personal information appliances quickly made a mockery of much government planning (well thinking), and Internet Safety was the one big idea, suggesting that whilst new technology may have many devious uses yet the government will help you ignore it. Only one website was mentioned in Labours manifesto in 2005, all you would ever need to access by 2010. However on the ground a huge amount of use of the web  was being made by you and I for learning and it was becoming a social by default; “google it” coming into use in 2002 and already entering dictionaries in 2006. More importantly Wikipedia started in 2001 and had reached a remarkable level of accuracy by 2005 – school kids had long been using it as a fast reference source; the web was being woven into our lives in the new online transaction economy. Since the Enlightenment and Diderot’s first Encyclopédie a societies choice of encyclopedia has helped define its character, now we had crowd-sourced outlines of our knowledge. More significantly the coordinating work of the public web by the Office of e-envoy had been disbanded in 2004 and replaced by a Dataset of Chief Information Officers who would be concerned to manage government databases (recommended by Sir Bill Gates!) with DirectGov our universal one-stop portal for e-srvice delivery. Not realising we had a world lead in information technology for learning Blair was running down policy in this area (Cameron would end it decisively in 2010) because he had met his EU targets for Modernising Government in i2005 and Technology was so ‘over’ and irrelevant to the UK housing-boom view of economic development.

Open Learn and Open Contexts 2007; Just as #edtech policy in the UK wound down, and pissed away a world-leading position, the US was bigging up its position as YOU became Man of the Year in Time magazine for 2006; #socialmedia was us. However Ewan Macintosh started TeachMeet, where teachers meet to share how they used tech for learning and began a bottom-up initiative of self-directed professional development, using wikis to co-ordinate their work. Wiki’s were enabling collaboration similarly to how blogs were promoting writing and peer-to-peer processes were being adopted by such as the School of Everything. The OU launched Open Learn (and since then Social Learn) recognising that a world of Open was here; web-enabled learning developments continued apace. We’d been though Distributed, then Social, Peer-to-Peer, now Open…

The collapse of all we held dear 2010 (UK); The abandonment of the potential of the web is now, of course, the default UK policy position since Prime Minister Cameron came to power and abolished Becta and any commitment to Technology Enhanced Learning; just as President Obama was releasing $666m to stimulate TEL within his first year in office, yet digital natives are now becoming digital practitioners in the UK by their own efforts. You just cannot make up the ignorance of the ruling classes and the blinkers of privilege with which they wear it; they achieve it with effortless ignorance and copious excesses.

Towards Open Scholarship; In a recent video I talk about a post-institutional future for learning. I don’t quite mean we wont have any institutions of learning, I think all institutions need to develop ‘architectures of participation‘, but that the locus of educational power will shift as the distributed tools and smart mob processes, that we are now surrounded by, enable more Open approaches to emerge. I sometimes call it Smart Mobs + Everything is Miscellaneous means Here Comes Everybody. However I like Terry Anderson’s championing of Open Scholarship and have proposed that we move from a formally structured traditional model of scholarship to a co-creation model of Open Scholarship, both using afresh and synthesising the processes we have learnt from in recent years. I hope this can develop significantly over the next few years, alongside the many new University projects, Webiversity, P2PU, DIY-U, @dougald University Project, my own WikiQuals and Rheingold U have just launched the Social Media Classroom. I think we are on the cusp of really profound changes in learning enabled by the web, but only if we can also add a deeper understanding of the social processes that education can serve. Donald Clark, and many others, rail against the fact that classroom learning hasnt changed in 100 years, but the definition of the educational needs of society by policy makers, namely a well disciplined workforce who follow leaders, hasn’t changed in that time either; education fits you up for society. To realise the potentials that the web enables, especially web 2.0, we will need not only the desired social transformations to be reflected in policy and in our own actions, but we also need some serious thinking about the purpose of education. Tim Rudd has just created an e-petition to this end. We have begun to challenge how knowledge is constructed (see Putting Context into Knowledge), but we also need to more consciously look at how society is constructed and how to create social changes; and change comes from the margins not from leaders…

So; what have we learnt from Web-enabled Education?  Has it begun to enable more learning-centred approaches? Have we used the affordances of new technology to improve our learning, lives and society? I’ll try and give some answers to that in the next post Untangling the Web; Learning, but your own comments and thoughts are most welcome…

By  @fredgarnett

This is a post expanding on my talk at the Purpos/ed Event for a wonderful bunch of  educational ‘Instigators’ at Sheffield. The slides are on slideshare and I will expand on those points and include some of the discussions from the day here. Doug Belshaw had asked me to keep it simple and to look at Keri Facer’s new book on Learning Futures. Keri looks at a number of issues relating to how schools might be organised in 2035 but the point that appealed to me most was the one of ‘slow citizenship‘ as it tied in with my Purpos/ed post discussing the Scottish notion of the Democratic Intellect and our  complete (English) inability to make the link between the life we want and the responsibilities of citizenship.

Keri’s vision of slow citizenship, or taking time to build the future you want, requires ’sustained commitment to the lived communities, local neighbourhoods & social relationships through which we live‘ and also answered Pat Kane’s challenge of how we might link Citizenship and Education. Brian Kelly interestingly asked me in the workshops why I emphasised the value of linking education and citizenship. I pointed out that I started teaching in the USA and realised that American students, who are often portrayed as models of ‘students as consumers’, actually saw education as a right guaranteed by their constitution and personally saw it as a way of improving themselves.

In my presentation I then argued that if we are to develop a ‘sustained commitment to the lived communities‘ we needed to examine how we could do that both within the classroom and in local Communities. In Keri’s terms how do we take the first steps to 2035?

The challenge of putting community into the Classroom

Back in 2006 I was lucky enough to spend some time in a workshop with some of the National Teaching Awards winners, as part of an Innovations in Learning project set up by Kevin Donovan. We were trying to get at what made them ‘award-winning’ teachers, what was so distinctive about their practice and how might we share that with others. In the end a number of factors emerged, which might be summarised as them developing their craft as teachers; I have incorporated them into The Craft of Teaching 2011 presentation. They saw three dimensions to what I now describe as their craft using Richard Sennett’s term. Firstly they needed to master anew the subject they had learnt in University in order to make it useable for learning. Secondly they needed to master the classroom, or learning environment they were managing, in order to make it their domain and to be able to differentiate between learners. Thirdly, and for me critically, they had to turn the power over to the learners. However the ability and experience necessary to do this typically takes 3-5 years to acquire, and crucially the award winners tended to have worked this out for themselves and were not supported whilst they did so. This emphasises the importance of Continuing Professional Development for teachers as it is their practice that they learn their craft. So if we want to make real what Keri talks about as ‘slow citizenship’ then teaching practice needs to change, and that change needs to be supported and recognised. But becoming teachers capable of creating a democratic intelligence in our learners, by enabling participation, also requires a substantive change in teaching practice that is recognised and supported institutionally.

Creating a Community Responsive Curriculum;

These debates resonate for me because of research I was involved in for the DfES which concerned how we might develop a ‘Digital Divide Content Strategy.’ This evolved to the Metadata for Community Content project looking at how we might model (and tag) ‘informal e-learning.’ As part of this John Cook at LTRI was involved in research into what made for best practice in UK online centres as part of his Designing for Informal Lifelong Learning work. He identified a ‘life cycles‘ quality to centre behaviours, as their focus evolved whilst people from their local community increasingly got involved in learning and also helping the centres run. In discussion with Professor Diana Laurillard, then at the DfES, we developed the Community Development Model of Learning which included the concept of a ‘Community Responsive Curriculum’ extending this key observation that successful centres responded to various, and differing needs in their community. These might be simple things like just providing a crèche, or changing the opening hours, as well as more complex issues like the subjects offered or the focus of the centre as a whole.

We failed to get the DfES to build on this work, but we did build an online centre to exemplify what we had learnt from this research and some of the very personal stories that people had to tell as they linked their personal and social stories with the activities of their centre; it is called Silwood Cyber Centre and was also designed to provide learning support training – click on Learner Support. As I put it on Saturday ‘above all socially excluded learners respond to a curriculum that makes sense of their lived experience.’ I have also discussed this work in Brasil and Germany where they respond more positively to ideas about learning that are rooted in community values. I think the focus on a community-responsive curriculum would help with Keri’s slow citizenship approach by making explicit the relationship between a community and what is learnt in the educational institutions within that Community. What we in the Learner-generated Contexts Group call ‘a coincidence of motivations leading to agile configurations.’ Another way of describing Keri’s call for future-building schools.

Conclusion; Making is Connecting

So these ideas, teachers that enable learner-centric learning within schools with a community-responsive curriculum, have been extant for a few years, if not acted upon. However educational theorists continue to throw up new ideas and I want to add in two new ones that extend these points and amplify the discussions at Purposedpsi. John Seeley Brown’s ‘New Culture of Learning‘ talks of Learning in the Collective, voluntary communities of learning, where the relationships and responsibilities change and evolve; unmediated andragogy perhaps. More relevantly perhaps David Gauntlett in Making is Connecting picks up on the Zeitgeist and says that in education ‘We no longer want to “sit back and be told” we want to be creative.‘ His work is about re-integrating creativity with learning, something we discuss in the PAH Continuum (See Heutagogy and the Craft of Teaching). Both Seeley Brown and Gauntlett want learning to be driven by passion and offer ways of unleashing that within the education system. Gauntlett offers four future scenarios and is deeply concerned with the practicalities of making sustainability and social justice a part of education.

#purposedpsi; The debates at Sheffield could also be characterised as being driven by passion, and added to these ideas as the inspirational educators discussed how education could be improved, usually with a focus on teaching. My take is that this is happening through any number of initiatives such as TeachMeet, purposed/ed itself and others where a real community concerned with improving practice has emerged. All we need to do now is to work out how to develop a social and political programme (for 2014) out of the newly emerging forms of professionalism that are so valuable and which purpose/ed itself seems to be tapping into and reflecting. We were challenged at #purposedpsi to think about how we might do this and Nicola McNee has addressed this question directly in her blog post Out of the Echo Chamber. I think we need new forms of professionalism, enabling what we might call ‘permissionless responsibility,’ which is what Doug and Andy have demonstrated in this initiative so far.

This workshop was exploring how to design ambient learning environments using the Emergent Learning Model. Slides for this session were updated from the Ambient Learning City talk March 2011.

If this is too abstract then we can reference the works of Howard Rheingold, Dave Weinberger and Clay Shirkey and describe the Emergent Learning Model as; Smart Mobs + Everything is Miscellaneous means Here Comes Everybody

We are also thinking of how we might use Innovation as an ‘Open Platform’ (Steven Johnson) to allow ‘generative innovations‘ to further transform learning. 

Workshop; The workshop was organised as follows and in the event we discussed about half the slides prepared.We decided to work in groups and address how to deal with learner self-organisation, resource creation and institutional changes. The schedule and workshop notes follow.

Schedule 1.00 Introduction

1.05 Overview of Emergent Learning Model and Ambient Learning City

1.15 Questions; Divide into 3 groups; Learners, Resources, Institutions

1.45 3 points from each group

1.55; Plenary from Floor

2.05; Summary

Activity Questions;

Learner’s How do we enable the self-organisation of learners

Issues; Will learners self-organise to learn about their interests? Are smart-mobs, flash-mobs the solution, are there emerging technologies that might enable better learning collaborations. Do we know how to design participative learning? Can we enable city places to spontaneously support or prompt informal learning?

Resources; How do we design resources for learner-appropriation

Are OERs any good for learning? What makes a good learning resource? Is a learning journey or a learning sequence a resource? Can we design learning sequences that can be edited and that capture ‘learning’? How do we create user-generated learning metadata? Do we have good content-creation toolkits that teachers and learners can use and share. Can QR Codes on buildings, say, make Manchester an Ambient Learning City or do we need social-media aggregator platforms to store sequences? Do students or staff do the aggregation, or is there a good co-creation model.

Institutions; How do we enable the post-hoc accreditation of learning

If accreditation is the key how can we organise distributed accreditation, or micro-accreditation? Do we need to create a Wikiquals resource? Can we do this in old, traditional, institutions or do we need to create new institutions like the Ragged University or Really Free School? Who owns learning accreditation? Can we develop post-institutional models of accreditation. What is the role of institutions in the world Clay Shirkey describes in Here Comes Everybody as ‘organising without organising’? Can we create Public Interest Institutions out of our cognitive surplus alone? Or, put another way, how do we make institutions ‘fit for context’

Ambient Learning City

How do we locate resources and support interactions within a city, and other ambient learning environments, so that they enable learning in context (useful interactions in context) and can also be recognised as learning in contexts for accreditation purposes? Remember this project is about examining ways to enable the accreditation of informal learning in a range of contexts which are selected by learners.

Or

Draw your Ambient Learning City (1.20) & lets have a general debate (1.45)

Questions?; We value Questions as much as your Answers

Session Resources

Emergent Learning Model

Open Context Model of Learning

Ambient Learning City

City as Material Project (Proboscis)

City Trajectories (Steve Benfold)

#mosialong www.mosialong.wordpress.com

Oh by the way I’m not an ‘expert’ in, er, Ambient Learning, rather I am a problem solver, and so this workshop addressed the problem of how do we re-organise the city to enable learner-generated contexts to emerge from citizen interactions…

Workshop Problem; How do we make Manchester ready to enable learner-generated contexts to emerge in response to learner needs? What toolkits do we need? What processes do technologies need to support to enable this. How may institutions facilitate these processes?

Workshop Feedback;

The group who attended decided to address some of the issues by category, learner’s, resources, and the role of institutions, and we moved to the Cornerhouse to further the discussions over refreshments. Thanks to Phil, Susan, Brendan and Andy for conversational extensions to the workshop. Beth, from MOSI-ALONG, who took notes during the workshop also joined us.

Observations;  I updated the Ambient Learning City presentation and tweaked it for the session, for example adding my motto  ’The answers are already here, we just aren’t asking the right questions yet!’ This was exemplified by the deep unease of the group at being asked to address questions allegedly outside of their competence, even in a workshop; the very ‘thinking in silos’ that the Emergent Learning Model is designed to address. I also failed to add that the definition of emergence is a ‘non-directional dynamic system‘ which is as good a way of defining an Ambient Learning City as ‘an uninterrupted opportunity to interact with a range of contexts’.

Learners; One group did come up with a delightful example of how to interact contextually by focussing on a park, suggesting a number of triggers, such as identifying trees, and using smart phones to upload information and link to other parks and park groups. ‘Learners’ could respond appropriately to the contextual opportunities as they rambled. They also offered some creative options such as creating holographic records of flora or fauna they came across; very cool! This suggests that different contexts have different affordances for stimulating learning and, as I have seen in earlier workshops, parks seem to offer much stimulus and great opportunities for ambient learning.

Institutions; Pulling together several discussions before and after the workshop it can be seen that institutions are the key blockers in this process. All attendees felt oppressed by the behaviours of their institutions and couldn’t immediately see ways of changing that. However along with other discussions they surfaced the idea of using the Mozilla Foundation, particularly for micro-qualifications (Mark van Harmelan) and developing a WikiQuals resource working on Guild-like ‘show and tell’ (own your own accreditation), which came up twice. The conclusion was that educational institutions are not ready to engage with supporting ambient, or extra-institutional, learning. Worse, educators aren’t ready to think about organising without organisations. Even worse, I personally think that there is hardly any relevant organisational literacy extant in the educational world, (which is what Nigel Ecclesfield and I are addressing on the Architecture of Participation blog)

Resources; Several ideas were floated in this area, unsurprisingly given the audience at CAL11. Lots of presentations, such as the LDSE planner, offered elements of the solution, as did Agnes Kukulska-Hume’s shading of mobile learning into learning on-the-move and her identification of the Four Frustrations of mobile use; a) Where’s my stuff? b) How bad is this connection! c) Dont know how to make this work! d) Make it more flexible so I can use the stuff! I think that a lot of the papers at CAL11 are involved in the early work of building the engine of the more flexible resources we will need to make ‘fit for context’ resources for user appropriation. These might then be used to support learner-generated needs and purposes that emerge in ambient learning contexts.

Conclusion; designing emergent, non-directional, dynamic learning systems; For me thinking of designing an interactive, or ambient Learning City using the Emergent Learning Model raises a lot of obvious issues. However most people haven’t thought of designing non-directional dynamic learning systems, to enable and support extra-institutional self-directed learning to emerge. Sugata Mitra is working on designing SOLE (Self-Organised Learning Environments), but at the moment his focus is within schools, despite the Hole in the Wall work. Our concern is with design learning in order to take it out of academe and into public spaces where it can be made purposeful, as Mike Wesch puts it, by its context.

We need to allow non-directional learning processes to emerge from the physical context by;

a) enabling groups to self-organise out of the classroom (what I am calling Digital Brigades after Leif Jerram’s Streetlife)

b) designing editable learning resources for appropriation and re-use, to allow for learner-generated content (see our Aggregate then Curate model)

c) preparing institutions for post-hoc accreditation.

We will be addressing these three issues over the coming weeks.

Update (Sept 2011)

a) MOSI-ALONG has developed the concept of organising triggers to allow learners self-organisation; See the Digital Cabinet of Curiosities approach.

b) MOSI-ALONG has developed the Aggregate then Curate Model

c) WikiQuals has outlined a post-hoc accreditation model based on the Show & Tell ideas discussed in the workshop

There is a debate going on in the conference on what CAL Researchers can do to enable social justice. Here are 11 ideas for a start, there are many more;

1. Set up a Public Interest Research Group and undertake research that benefits your community eg CoPIRG; Train your researchers to be socially responsible

2. Volunteer. Work in a community centre and enable socially inclusive learning to happen; learn from the socially excluded 

3. Set up a local Goose Club, bring together people from different sectors, education, culture, business, community. Think up transformative projects; do the research

4. Trust your students. Everyone wants to learn, but perhaps not in the way you want them to; enable their epistemic cognition.

5. Make your work participative; Use the PAH Continuum in your teaching and enable collaborative and creative work (& recognise it)

6. Tell your local council you want to set up a pop-up learning centre & train people for a day, or a pop-up research centre & hold a ResearchMeet

7. Get your University to follow the guidance on Public Engagement; get social justice in their mission statement; Volunteer to be your VC’s Technology Steward

8 Develop a Policy Forest for your area and identify the policy consequences of your work; tell the govt about it.

9 Create and set up a peer-to-peer EMA account and subsidise an entitled student to go to college (£30 a week) and sponsor them to go to your Uni

10. Create a hashtag for twitter and have a weekly discussion on how these projects are going #11rsj (research for social justice)

11 Trust and develop your professionalism; set up P2P CPD networks, and most of all believe in yourself; you can make a difference

This is the second of three posts looking at developing the heutagogic qualities of the Open Context Model of Learning (OCM) into the Emergent Learning Model and from that examining the possibilities of building an Ambient Learning City in Manchester (with MOSI-ALONG). The OCM is an attempt to re-conceptualise learning post web 2.0, with a concern to rethink roles and responsibilities for learning as suggested by the LGC Manifesto. An earlier blog post, the first of a sequence of three of which this is number two, used the concept of the PAH Continuum to look at how teachers might develop a craft of teaching that would enable and support the self-organisation of learners. Sugata Mitra, who works on similar ideas, is now talking about Self-Organised Learning Environments (SOLE).  However what we are discussing here is perhaps the conceptual follow on, what I call an Emergent Learning Model (ELM), for reasons that I hope will become clear. 

Emergent Learning Model

The ELM is an attempt to take forward the Open Context Model of Learning, which essentially are fresh ideas about how to re-conceptualise the processes of learning by taking account of the affordances of web 2.0 technologies. The Open Context Model of Learning is a way of thinking about the relationships of learning such that a (teacher) develops both a subject understanding as well as an ability in the (learner) to take forward their learning in that subject. That is often taken to mean through classroom interactions, but it doesn’t have to mean only that, it could start with learner interactions; conversations, interests and collaboration.

ELM was also stimulated by an attempt to address the requirement of the EU’s i2015 for countries to integrate informal, non-formal and formal learning, an extension of the Bologna Process of educational ‘harmonisation’. However I have tried to do this NOT by subsuming all modes of learning under rules set by a University, as i2015 might imply, BUT by re-thinking what we mean by each of these modes of learning; informal, non-formal and formal. What I hoped to do below with the ELM is to show how all learning can be complementary and, given that everyone wants to learn, how we can design learner-responsive resources, institutions and networks.

It is from this latter point, which is reflected in Sugata Mitra’s work, recently described by his article in the Guardian on 10 year-olds teaching themselves O-levels, that the description Emergent Learning Model comes from. This model could have been called an Organic Model (after Ken Robinson’s discussion in The Element about the nature of creative learning) or a Discovery Model of Learning (after the affordances of Google’s tools for learning) but both Mitra’s description of his work as being about emergent behaviour, and Steven Johnson’s description of innovation coming from emergent behaviour evolving out of new ‘open platforms’, encourage me to think that what is being modelled here is the emergent behaviour of learning in any context. Perhaps because it is self-organising and uses resources as needed in the learning process, not to reflect the structure in which they are provided.

As a method of engaging with these ideas you might prefer to look at the ELM itself first (presented as a table on Slideshare) and then pose me, or yourself some questions as to how it might work in practice; or what it’s flaws might be; comments gratefully received and answered. For the rest of this post I will elaborate on the three part structure of ELM and what this re-conceptualisation of learning as a system then allows us to do with learning and educational systems design.

Rethinking Informal, non-formal and Formal Learning

Firstly I will examine how we might most usefully think about learning, by trying to tease out how we might best describe its informal, non-formal and formal characteristics.

Informal Learning

Informal Learning has often been seen as learning we do in our free time outside of institutions. What we choose to learn informally usually comes from our own interests. Historically this has often been located in libraries, sometimes described as ‘street-corner Universities’ because of the ready availability of reference books for fact-checking, of text-books, for subject-based understanding, of non-fiction books, for a broader understanding of the world, and of novels, for descriptions of the lives of others. But it has also been seen as a key part of community or adult learning, that is as long as managerial targets related to formal assessment processes aren’t added to that learning process.

For the purposes of Emergent Learning Model I want to focus more on the aspect of the interests of individuals and also to foreground the social process of learning. I think Mitra’s work is so successful with learners because he cleverly foregrounds the social process of learning by using access to learning resources as a framing device (resources are how we scaffold learners as I put it in the ELM table). He designs the pre-condition for social processes to emerge, which is the essence of informal learning. It has been said that you cant design for informal learning, but I think we actually do that much of the time, as the social processes of informal learning are in many ways the pre-condition for formal learning outcomes to emerge. So for the Emergent Learning Model I will define informal learning as;

Informal Learning is the social processes that support self-organised learning in any context

Non-formal learning;

When I was working on the Metadata for Community Content project, partly looking at how we might create ‘digital divide’ (or socially inclusive) content for informal, or ‘community’ e-learning, we concluded that we were working on a project concerning non-formal learning, which we defined as ‘structured learning opportunities without formal learning outcomes’. Arguably this was because we were working in the context of what became named as Adult & Community Learning (ACL), and we were concerned to identify learning content that would better engage disaffected learners. Based on an adaptive model of resource creation we termed the informal model of e-learning, which was a dynamic co-creation model of learning, we identified a process of resource creation that responded to learners interests whilst removing the institutional power relationships of educators from the learning process.

We developed a learning model in which content creation toolkits would be the primary tool needed by teachers, and which the website aclearn.net was originally predicated upon, and such learning content, supported by a range of resources such as people, was capable of brokering learning processes. Consequently I have come to see the structuring of learning opportunities through resources, something I don’t think OERs do, as the key process in non-formal learning. (The co-creation dimension of this suggests that learner-generated content can have as much value as educator-generated content, for certain aspects of learning – as suggested by the concept of obuchenie)

Non-formal learning is structured learning resources without formal learning outcomes.

Formal Learning

For me Formal Learning means education as a system, rather than learning as a process, whether it be academic or vocational, which is about the institutionalisation of processes surrounding learning. This may be a process that prepares people for University, those secular storehouses of knowledge;

• Primary school prepares us to be learners as defined by formal education,
• Secondary school assesses if we have become good enough learners to become students,
• University is where fully accredited learning finally takes place.

People who ‘fail’ this academic sifting process are offered vocational education so they can acquire a socially useful set of skills,

People who  also ‘fail’ vocationally are expected to be sufficiently ‘literate’ to converse with the system that failed them.

People who succeed in this process obtain various forms of accreditation and qualifications that prove they have ‘learnt.’  In many cases enough learning goes on for this system to be able to replicate itself successfully, even adapting to new social norms that are laid on top of it (academies, free schools, etc). The most significant part of institutionalised formal education system are the institutions themselves. What formal learning, or education, has really become specialised in is maintaining itself as a set of institutions and buildings. But this is done to enable them to offer accredited qualifications to students and this is the essence of formal learning, rather than their buildings and location.

Formal learning is the process of administering and quality assuring the accreditation of learning and the qualifications

Emergent Learning Model

So what ELM aims to do is to replace the notion of learning as being a process of accreditation, that occurs within an institutionally constrained and hierarchical system, with a series of processes that better matches how people actually learn, following interests, collaborating and finding resources. It is far less about serving the needs of academia and more about meeting the needs and interests of human beings because we can actually Trust Us.

ELM also tries to take account of, and respond to, much of the new thinking about learning and much else, done by many in the last twenty years; emergent properties, network effects, systems design, etc., in response to the permanent beta which is everyday life, what happens whilst you are making plans  as John Lennon put it. Which is not to deny that the requirements of studying different subjects vary and that people have different capabilities, which present a range of issues that need to be addressed within an education system. Nor that a Ph.D isn’t much harder than a GCSE (although at the time I found A-levels the hardest level of education, Masters degrees are a whole lot easier when you rise to that stage), or that devising modes of assessment and accreditation that reflect the quality of learning undertaken isn’t tricky and requires experience, sense and tact. But we have learnt a lot about the practical concerns of recognising learning and we are smart enough to reflect on what we have learnt, and even perhaps devise new systems of learning; which is what I am, like many others, trying to do here.

So the underpinning idea of the Emergent Learning Model is that we should start with the social processes of everyday life, and design a system that enables learning to naturally emerge, rather than respond to the hierarchical status-frenzy of large academic organizations. We should value the professionalism of the teacher and the desire of the learner, and create resources that enable those interests to merge. Because people should be the resource with which we scaffold institutions;

Reading the Emergent Learning Model table;

The table is designed as a heuristic, an aide memoire, to capture as much of learning and education within a single table in order to facilitate reflection and discussion on how we might design, support and implement models of learning rather than simply reproducing the traditional structures of institutionalised education; which do have good qualities for administering paper-based record-keeping systems.

a) education; is a process organized by institutions who offer qualifications based on set texts to be used by learning groups in classes to meet accreditation criteria. Teachers provide resources and broker these educational processes.

b) learning; is a process of problem-solving carried out by people individually or collaboratively by finding resources and discussing the emerging issues with trusted intermediaries.

An underpinning value of each is the contrasting views of the learner, in an education system the processes are designed with the belief that learners don’t want to learn and need extrinsic motivations; the currently popular social capital model of education embodied in the Browne Report and education fees and graduate tax models is based on an extrinsic model. A learning system is designed around the belief that learners are interested in their learning and only need intrinsic motivations. Extrinsic motivations may be needed to create engagment in learning that isn’t interesting which trusted intermediaries are capable of addressing.

Summary;

So the ELM can be described as;

People + Resources = Learning

But asks the question do we present this institutionally or adaptively. New approaches to learning like SOLE, new theories such as the Open Context Model of Learning (and many others such as Connectionism, Netagogy, mobigogy, etc.) show that we can foreground learning rather than the institution and design FOR emergence.

The table is designed to show that Education and Learning overlap at all points, but a difference in emphasis, values and design can enable learning to drive institutional behaviours rather than institutional priorities to constrain what can be recognized as learning.

A simple reference model;

Another way of looking at this using books as a reference could be that;

Smart Mobs + Everything is Miscellaneous means Here Comes Everybody

We can design learning systems that are inclusive, high-value and also enable everyone to reach their potential. New tools and approaches are emerging that challenge us to do that; this is my take on how to address that challenge.