robyn jay

I’ve enjoyed revisiting Herbert Kohl’s ‘I won’t learn from you‘ today. If you haven’t read it it’s an oldie but goody. In particular his final chapter ‘Creative maladjustment and the struggle for public education’ is particularly relevant to our current work on the Bruce Declaration.

Here are a few extracts…

When it is impossible to remain in harmony with one’s environment without giving up deeply held moral values, creative maladjustment becomes a sane alternative to giving up altogether. Creative maladjustment consists of breaking social patterns that are morally reprehensible, taking conscious control of one’s place in the environment, and readjusting the world one lives in based on personal integrity and honesty……

Creative maladjustment is reflective. It implies adapting your own particular maladjustment to the nature of the social systems that you find repressive. It also implies learning how other people are affected by those systems, how personal discontent can be appropriately turned into moral and political action, and how to speak out about the violence that thoughtless adjustment can cause or perpetuate.

Unfortunately, the momentum of educational research and the attempt to turn education into a single, predictable and controllable system with national standards and national tests pulls in the opposite direction. Teaching well is a militant activity that requires a belief in children’s strengths and intelligence no matter how poorly they may function under the regimes imposed upon them.

The book was originally published in 1991, about the time I started working in adult literacy/numeracy. At least at that point in time in Australian education we worked within a system that (although not perfect) genuinely valued and funded education for ALL, personally directed learning, and student-centred engagement. It was a good time to be teaching. It’s been pretty much downhill from there. Grandmothers can no longer gain specific assistance to read to their grandchildren, adult learners are pumped through competencies they do not need or want, truly community based programs have been axed or drastically under-funded, and insufficient allowances mean that our learners must spend every spare hour working in low paid jobs rather than engaging in debate and critique with peers that might rock the system. It’s time for a change.

[CC FlickR image shared by Rose Latka]

Finally finding a minute to post some notes and reflections on last weekends RCC in Canberra focusing on wikis.

I’ve got to say that beforehand I couldn’t see how 3 days could possibly be spent talking about wikis, and while for me the conversations around learning and teaching were far more interesting, the breadth of wiki-related topics covered and the diversity of wiki interests represented was great. Two of the education focused conversations were captured by Steph over at TalkingVTE here and here, and there are moves to write up a Declaration (called Bruce) that as Tom Worthington aptly describes  ‘is intended to inform current government inquiries into education and into the NBN. Policies, programs and funding could then be provided to have services directly to students, resources for teachers and for educational institutions’.  See Tom’s post for more on this and if interested let us know.

Mark Dilley from AboutUs.org acted facilitator. I’m still trying to get my head around how useful and/or sustainable the site might be. It’s described as ‘for and about businesses, organizations, blogs, forums -really anyone who has a website’…. aiming to ‘provide visitors with information about websites, a way to share their knowledge about websites, and a place to promote their own sites.’ Given that I have trouble posting to and keeping up to date my existing sites I’m not sure how I’ll go with this but ready to be convinced….

It was interesting to speak to the guys from Lonely Planet about their wiki use and perceived future directions. They freely admitted that the company is still book-oriented and agreed that changes were needed if they were to remain the travel guide/network of choice especially for the younger travelers. They need to be responding to these kinds of demands and fast.

There was a lot of talk about Wikipedia and mediawiki. After my failed attempt to create a page on wikipedia with Alex Hayes and the subsequent lack of any forum for discussion about it, or recourse, I’m not a big believer of its democratic capabilities. There was however some interesting discussion around troublemakers, editors, peacekeepers and facilitators. Although some form of moderation via ‘official moderators’ or the community is clearly needed I kept getting a niggly sense that its pretty autocratic in the end.

We spent a couple of hours talking about the wiki ‘facilitator’ role. Having educators, users, editors etc all side by side enabled some interesting discussion which I attempted to capture here…

[CC FlickR image by robynejay]

Thanks to all the sponsors and participants for an interesting few days!

A few reflections and notes from last week’s Transmedia Victoria event…

So what IS transmedia? It was clear that the form and definition remain quite loose still (which is good).  Here are a few pointers…

• ‘cool internet based scavenger hunt kinds of things’
• alternate reality entertainment
• overlay of entertainment space onto the real world
• interacts with you via phone, email, browser and the street where you live
• puts audience in the story
• brings a story to you
• story surrounds the audience
• non-linear : newly found evidence builds on from past
• about enhancing experiences, not repeating them
• dynamic/ engaging

Tassos Stevens from Coney spoke of the principles of play:

• adventure
• reciprocity and
• loveliness

It struck me that there is little of any of them in adult education. How do we reinstate the joy of learning and creativity?

Flint Dille said ‘treat me like an interactive object’ (nice – a shame many educators are simply megaphones), and spoke of media franchise (franchise being defined as intellectual property’). The key elements of a franchise:

• hero
• home
• vehicle
• friends and allies
• enemies
• iconic gadgets
• a unique world

OK am lost a bit here with any possible cross over to education….

Quote: ‘if you want to keep control of your franchise, don’t sell it to anyone’

There was a constant allusion to ‘production’ and ‘rights management’; how do we put the strategy in the hands of learners and teachers? Key concerns were who owns what, in what territories, for how long, what is it worth, is revenue shared?

Quote: ‘It is the ‘inconsistencies’ in a story that makes an audience feel ‘smart”

When asked about the role of a franchise in SIMS Flint responded that SIMS = simulation which is not a game. A simulation aims to recreate something real.

It strikes me that the storytelling/ narrative in a simulation still exists but is placed in the hands/ minds of the participants.

Steve Peters introduced himself as ‘experience designer‘ – nice term for teachers/ learning designers I thought

Steve listed the roles needed for a production to be:

• writer/s
• experience designer/s
• producer/s
• graphic artists
• IT/programmers
• QA testers

Props in a story can include any manner of things including:

• foreign language
• digital files
• old documents
• artifacts
• music lyrics
• sky-writing
• hidden USB drives
• maps & GPS
• live events
• architectural projections
• receipts
• Facebook pages
• clothing
• games
• action figures

The ability to react to audience moves or sticking points requires a lot of tap-dancing Steve said – 20% of the design needs to be left open to respond.

Andra Sheffer spoke of online staying power. Only 3 minutes for adults but over 10 mins for kids. She urged us to design what makes sense not whats cool, that simpler is often better and that the transmedia element should be tagged onto other platforms – ie. that transmedia design must be integrated.

Sound familiar?

She also stressed that ‘there are no more borders – think WORLD’ and that ‘promotion never ends with digital projects’

Clear relevance for education….

Kerrin McNeil from Hoodlum spoke of ‘making stories irresistible’ (read LEARNING here), that ‘life is multi-platform’ (and so should be learning), that ‘audiences are ‘moved’ when content is personalised’ (again relevant for LEARNING) and that we need to remember that audiences (and learners) want to interact in different ways – watch, play, share.

Final thoughts…….

If transmedia has a place in learning and teaching it’s potential will need to be transferred into the hands of ‘normal’ people (in the same way we did with digital stories). Scaffolds are needed to guide the process and support the integration of media. We need to harness the transmedia-like elements of good teaching practice and extend them. Community projects are a good stepping stone/intro but I could not get a sense of anything on the day that was not being ‘produced’ (done for/to audiences). My big take-away …. we need to strengthen the fun/joy, problem solving, choice and multimodal aspects of education.

[CC FlickR image from Powerhouse Museum Collection]

I’m heading to Melbourne on Thursday for the Transmedia Victoria conference. At this point I’m not sure what I’ll be able to contribute but I’m interested to see where the cross-over might be for education.

I’ve had a long term interest in digital storytelling. In 2003 I was lucky enough to visit Daniel Meadows at the Capture Wales project and in the following year a group of us began to experiment with how the concept (and technology) could be simplified enough to be placed in the hands of teachers and students. It has been pretty successful and I think I’m safe in saying that it’s now a pretty much accepted/ mainstream strategy for engagement. What DST lacks, on the whole, is interactivity.

Transmedia takes narrative/ storytelling to another level. It’s multi-platformed, non-linear, multi-pathed networked storytelling with multiple entry points and outlets. I think where it differs significantly from digital storytelling and where it hold promise for education is that it supports audience interaction, participation and collaboration.

There’s some interesting overlap with what Margaret Turner (University of the Sunshine Coast) discusses in her paper ‘Contemporary Approach to Writing Non-Linear Online Learning Resources’ (Journal of Learning Design 2(2)) . She describes the structure of the content as distributed, connected, multi-directional, potential, open and ephemeral.

‘What is needed in writing for networked media’, she says, ‘ is a way of writing learning content that will clearly signal to participants the following characteristics of the medium:

• That useful meaning can be developed following concepts that are distributed rather than presented together.
• That there is no hard edge to a discipline, it spreads out to connect with other disciplines and the real world.
• That concepts can be connected along multiple paths in diverse directions to reach similar meanings.
• That there is never-ending potential for expansion, growth; more and more data to be connected and made available to the conversation.
• That things change—information is updated, ideas are modified, links expire, data is moved.
• That control of information is spread and all who connect are potentially stakeholders’

Technology and online spaces are becoming accessible enough yet sophisticated enough now for some really exciting development (make sure you check out Inanimate Alice if you have not already done so). But it does strike me that transmedia in essence really is nothing new. If we consider the project-based approach taken by many GOOD primary school teachers, the learning design employed, while not often digital, certainly has a multimodal approach. Kids develop understanding of a topic via stories, games, art, movement; they build, talk, listen and present.

Whatever comes of the day I’m looking forward to stepping outside the education zone again; hopefully there will be fresh ideas and new connections to power me onward.

[CC FLickR image by crissxross]

Another academic year looms and info days are swarming with fresh faced enthusiastic new students. I feel like Mr Bean in the department store perfumery skit, holding my nose and warning them not to enter! I’m feeling quite disheartened with higher ed. Would I pay $30k + for a degree? NO – yet its a hurdle imposed en route to career. As consumers we need to start demanding value for money but instead we meekly accept the tripe.

I’ve been re-reading my FLL paper from 2003. 7 years is a long time and I blush at it’s naivety but there are important connections there I want to revisit. What I found then was that the most successful, innovative and engaging programs were happening in small community-based media, youth projects and community development areas. I suspect its still the case.

I grieve to hear stories of educators being told that research is top priority and that teaching should/must be compromised if necessary. Academics are told to walk into lectures unprepared if necessary, young innovators are told that their careers will go nowhere unless they stop focusing on learning and instead churn out papers and bring in dollars. It’s all about status and income; a factory line of knowledge. Good teachers who toe the line end up working 14 hour days; doing 2 jobs as researcher AND educator, and as a result get sick and burn out.

I’ve been feeling like the past two years were wasted but a flow of messages are giving me heart that I have made some difference. But I’m sick of battling from within the constraining shackles of being an employee; there’s only so much that can be pushed uphill. I’m hoping to skirt around the edges for a bit and find some new avenues to engage and affect change. For a start I’m heading on down to the Transmedia conference at ACMI in Melbourne and we’ll see if openings appear.

[ CC cartoon by gapingvoid ]

This post is in response to Alex Hayes’ request for comments regarding his post over on Posterous. It’s an important debate that needs to be spread more widely so I’m repeating here in the hope it will gain some broader readership.

Alex, I’m speaking frankly and openly here as a critical friend, and hopefully to drive the debate forward . Thankfully I did have a posterous account as I would otherwise not have commented at all via the twitter and facebook login options – a tad ironic under the circumstances I think. I guess what concerns me most about your post and current state of mind is the ‘cup half empty’ lens. IMHO it’s about sensible high level policy, being informed, having the required literacy skills, and having and exercising choice.

As a company promoting a particular technology it naturally IS job to provide full and detailed information about what that technology can and cannot do, and the known inherent risks. As such, with educational clientele,  it would be pointless to offer any technology that was at odds with core educational principles (ie wellbeing of learners). It is, therefore, good to alert those customers and to facilitate debate.

People are buying POV cameras because they make the videoing that they’ve been doing since 8mm days more convenient. What has potential (as opposed to being a threat) are advancements in bandwidth that allow that content to be sent handled electronically. How it’s sent and where it’s stored and the systems that that content interacts with OF COURSE must be considered and evaluated. I don’t doubt that technologies exist that have the potential to capture more than a ‘rich media clip that shows a skill’ but to paint this as something ‘sinister’ and impending sounds a little paranoid. Risks and potential misuse exists with almost ANY technology; gaming is a good example.

Of course there are negatives around broadcasting your location and exposing your activities and habits etc. We all must be informed, learners must have choice, educators have a duty of care. Again it comes back to contemporary and ever-evolving literacy skills. All choices must be made intelligently but I don’t believe that that choice will not remain.

Educational institutions, armed with that information and skilled/professional staff then choose products and methodologies to meet the needs of their learners and contexts.

To say that geolocation is one of the most influential forces in the VET sector is just a tad over ambitious at this point in time but indeed it has POTENTIAL.

It’s easy when something is a passion or focus to think that the world should also have the same urgent interest. Unfortunately there are also students for whom traditional (safe) text-based modes of communication has failed, trainers who stand and lecture at poor unsuspecting students, kids who live in such poor circumstances that they cannot attend to learning. We all have our interests and passions and together that builds the diverse and rich professional community of which we are a part. Multimodal L&T and the use of multimedia in education are truly WONDERFUL things. A scare campaign is not what is needed.

I agree that the majority of adults are very poor at critical reflection generally however if there is ‘little open discourse about the implications for pedagogy that this technology is set to unleash’ it is probably because a) people are too busy dealing with more pressing matters, b) there is little balanced information to debate at present and c) there is no evidence that this IS or will in the near future be an actual legitimate concern for people.

‘Insidious modes of digital employee compliance’ is a separate and wider issue. We must be aware and able to opt-in and out even if OUT means leaving an organisation. But to be honest it concerns me little that the employer of Mike and John the landscape gardeners are aware that they spent 2 hours relaxing in the shade under the trees of my local park instead of getting on with their list of jobs including my new garden.

So having said all that we DO need to be informed and I’ll look forward to any further information you provide us and we DO need to focus on the implications of what we implement for learners but we must do so with a positive mindset lest we go sit in a cave and scratch on the walls with sticks.

And as for Latitude, most of us turned that off months ago as a pain in the arse.

CC FlickR image by paloooza

I’ve been working on my eLearning10 session today; trawling through sites and tools and papers about FlickR in education and gathering my thoughts. For many years now it, along with social bookmarking, has been at the top of my list for ways to engage educators in the world of e-learning.

After all this time there is little that comes even near it in terms of functionality and it seems that even Blackboard and Moodle have recognised it’s benefits with both Bb9.1 and Moodle2.0 including search and mashup tools in their new in-built functionality. To be honest with increasing use, geolocation interest and 3rd party tools to supplement FlickR I can only see its usage growing further. Interestingly there are now over 1.6m creative commons images in FlickR available for use under various licenses; it makes my lowly 9,000 odd very trivial.

In my session I’ll be focusing broadly on FlickR’s potential uses but will look in particular at how it could be used to enable individual portfolios of work within courses. The presentation will be is now up in my slideshare account . My FlickR in Education guide is on my wiki and there’s also a list in Diigo that may be of interest. Here’s a start of a brainstorm of uses but I’ve love to hear more ideas if you have them.

With the conclusion of yet another Framework iteration looming and what could be the possible demise of the Framework as a whole, I’ve been thinking about what worked and didn’t work with the old LearnScope projects.

While team-centred action learning projects were well loved, it was because they:

• Provided time to explore, reflect, practice, play
• Allowed members to focus on particular interests and needs
• Allowed freedom and space for diversion
• Had practical, concrete outcomes
• Fed/grew into future projects

It was NOT that the projects were scoped and facilitated by the teams themselves.

It strikes me that the old LearnScope model could be reframed at a local level at least, drawing on the strengths of the previous model but  tightening the design and extending the timeframe.

What if a TAFE Institute or cluster of small providers (as an example only) scoped and facilitated a series of action learning staff capability projects drawing membership from across all sections based on interest (and commitment)?

The scope of the projects, designed and facilitated by workforce development expertise, could reflect strategic directions, input from staff, national agendas (in a practical sense) and international trends.

The projects would be carefully designed around action learning principles allowing space for individuals to diversify and time for learning, trial and design. The diverse teams would offer rich cross-fertilisation of ideas and enable new connections and cross-industry collaboration. The team members would act as champions to demo their learning and ideas back in their sections. The extended time frame, if well designed,  would allow plenty of time for workshops, meetings, individual projects etc and the outcome would be concrete resources and case studies presented at a staff forum.

Just an idea. I’ll think on it more.

CC FlickR image by its*me*red

It was suggested to me yesterday by a senior manager that we should not focus on the new and emerging technologies that only 5% would embrace but stick to the ‘basics’. Unfortunately the ‘basics’ do not include the new and emerging tools and applications that provide ease of mastery, or which enable multimodal spaces for creation, engagement and collaboration… instead think LMS, anti-plagiarism and assessment.
It’s a depressing state of affairs that promulgates antiquated teaching practice and unengaged learners.

But even where contemporary applications are promoted and supported there is poor take up. Why?
In some cases support mechanisms are ineffective, in others there is lack of policy level encouragement, lack of time, lack of resources, etc etc – an endless list of excuses that does not explain why a small number DO take up new approaches and opportunities. Even in an ideal context where excellent applications are carefully chosen, and time and resources are allocated to mentoring staff in their use I suspect take-up would remain low.
I’m starting to wonder if the key issue comes down to culture and personal philosophy.

The underpinning philosophy behind many of the contemporary learning applications is openness. They support a collaborative learning community that positions the learner as a valued content creator; that values sharing, discovery, connections, opinion, reflection, partnerships. Unfortunately however openness and collaboration are threatening and foreign to many educators. They are not a part of their lives and they are not a part of their teaching practice. It’s a very difficult task to live one set of values and to cast them aside at the workplace gates.

In higher education academics are part of a system that dictates the PhD hurdle be jumped to obtain permanency; a PhD that in essence requires secrecy and non-collaboration lest ideas be stolen and which results in a piece of work that is read by 1.8 others. Without knowledge of contemporary education practice they lecture, providing content and grading papers. They teach as they were taught in a system that prizes paper publications and revenue generation, not which celebrates and expects innovative teaching. So presented with, and trained in the use of, social media/software spaces and applications the focus is on two things: content and assessment. Wikis look good (if kept private) because they allow PDF uploads or easy authoring of lecture notes and are used for such until the users is lured away by LMS assessment and grading admin functionality. Blogs and podcasts (if kept private) might be used to post concepts. FlickR is used to illustrate course content (we’ll use the work of others but not put anything back). And that’s as far as it goes until told that you can do all of those things together in one place via the LMS and its automatically private – no risk, no exposure.
The few that do embrace new applications and approaches I suspect live that life of openness and collaboration. They gravitate towards technology that supports their core values; that position learners to embrace (or at least be exposed to) what they themselves are passionate about; a different way of living.

How can the minority reculture the majority? Should they?  The developers of collaborative/ social applications and open content, and the few that can model effective use, are change agents. They are laying at the feet of the masses a new approach to life and learning and working but what does it take to value what is offered in its entirety?

CC FlickR image by anmuell

I ran a digital storytelling workshop this week for the first time in several years.

I have to say I spent time pondering whether a) the emergence of easy to capture and distribute video had superseded the digital story medium (largely still images + voice over) and b) the extent to which the digital story methodology had reached mainstream in a learning facilitator’s toolkit.

I remember clearly my first exposure to the concept. I was sitting at an ACAL conference keynote by Glynda Hull with adult literacy/ESL colleagues late 2001. For 10 years I’d been experimenting with the means to engage learners the education system had failed and to give them a voice in a world of written text. It was one of those aha moments. Exploration of the concept was pivotal in my 2003 FLL research and travels (including visits to Daniel Meadows and the Capture Wales project). Despite early frustrations with the lack of easy to use non-MAC software, we’ve seen technology increasingly become more accessible and supportive of multimodal user-generated content. In this weeks workshop, being in a Windows environment, we were using Photo Story 3 (with recommendations to progress to Premiere Elements). I continue to find PS3 very clunky and limiting but it remains a good entry point for non-techies.

The 15 participants yesterday came from all areas of VET- hospitality, business studies, adult basic ed, English language, child studies etc. The broad mix enabled some fruitful brainstorming around potential uses.

In addition to my planned agenda (largely hands on in PS3) a few things arose and were covered. I’ll build these into future sessions:

• how to identify image size
• how to resize images in Photoshop
• how to create plain coloured title slides/images
• how to find creative commons images in Flickr using FlickR CC
• how to document image attributions

It was a great session. The digital storytelling methodology has not lost its appeal;it still has a place in an engaging learning design.

Thanks to SWSI and the group for making it possible. My slides used are available in slideshare.