Last week I attended a meeting of the JISC ‘Experts’ group on ‘ Effective Practice in a Digital Age’. The meeting provided a platform for the dissemination of some key examples from the JISC e-Learning Programme, and enabled a  discussion of some issues such as how good practice can be identified, and how institutions can (or perhaps do) adapt to changes in a host of areas, including curriculum, technology, and learner demography.

There was quite a bit of use of different social learning technologies during the meeting, ranging from post-its to text walls, and twitter. This interplay of brief messages helped link up conversations happening at different tables, and has helped to provide a record of some of the discussions. The themes which emerged for me were: social learning, learning across disciplines, and institutional change. This article will contain a few of my own reflections on the meeting, picking up on those points which resonate most loudly with my own experience and practice.

An encouraging feature of the meeting for me was the strong element of cross-sectoral communication, reflecting the tendency for more JISC projects to involve FE and Work-Based Learning . Adult Community Learning and the Third Sector are currently less well represented, but our time will come!

Judy Hardy (the  LEaD project) looked at how the institution (The University of Edinburgh) is responding to the changing technologies and learner expectations. Some very positive messages emerged about how learners were empowered by the technologies, and how staff  were supported by the institution. Perhaps the most interesting thing which emerged was how new students did not have particularly high expectations of how the institution would use technologies, when they arrived, but were nevertheless very happy to make use of institutional technologies, such as the VLE. Further evidence, if any were needed, that the ‘digital natives’ idea is not really helping us to understand the relationship between learners and technology.

Helen Beetham addressed how curriculum design does, or should respond to changes in business models, learner demographics, and technology. Curriculum is at the junction between the personal and the institutional domains, and so is a fertile ground for change. Discussion around our table focused on cross –institutional issues (e.g. in franchised courses), and on informal learning.  “You can’t control, design, or plan informal learning. We can support and facilitate it as we have always done.” (James Clay). “We need to understand the balance between structured/guided and informal learning – and who does the balancing?” (Helen Beetham). This is a key question for ACL people, since it draws on that rich tradition which exists in the Worker Education Association (WEA) and other places, whereby learners can themselves help to determine the courses which are provided. This culture is under threat from increased control (e.g. by funding and inspection agencies); but technology – wisely used – may help to restore the balance by giving the learner more control. To do this teachers in ACL need to learn from the experience of other sectors, especially FE and HE, but not necessarily to emulate the approaches which they have taken.

Alan Staley of Birmingham City University described the use of simple 3D virtual town to situate the learning experience. This had the effect for many users of linking different curricular areas to the same geographical area, and hence building bridges between departments as diverse as biomedical sciences and geography. This could be linked up to more sophisticated technologies (e.g. Google Maps, Google Street) in due course. I particularly liked the involvement of students in making video role-plays – this was a good example of user-generated content.

In the afternoon, I attended a discussion about effective use of social software led by Shailey Minocha (Open University) and Heather Williamson (JISC), and which was informed by a set of case studies  at  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/projects/socialsoftware08.aspx. While agreeing with the recommendations which came from the project, what emerged most powerfully from the discussion for me,  was that managing learning activity using social software requires very highly developed teaching skills. Activities needs to add genuine value to the learning, integrate with institutional systems, be flexible and be efficient. Moreover, the task of the students can become more complex: they must re-learn some of their skills, and become familiar with new tools. These are not easy requirements to meet, but a host of good examples which is continually emerging shows that good teachers can make this approach work.

Presentations from the meeting can be downloaded from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningpedagogy/elearningexperts/april09.aspx, and Twitter discussions can be found at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23jiscexperts09

From April  1st, education and library services in prisons in Wales formally became the responsibility of the Welsh Assembly Government (See Wales.gov.uk/new). As Deputy Minister for Skills, John Griffiths AM, pointed out “This allows education and training in Welsh prisons to be fully integrated with our policies. We will ensure that quality education is provided to equip offenders for life outside and prevent re-offending.” It can be of crucial importance to ex-offenders to become comfortable with technologies of which they may have had little experience, in order for them to live independently following their release.

Historically, eLearning in prisons has not been straightforward, due in part to the technical and security constraints in the provision of online services, as well as a host of other issues which are well described in a recent report of the Prisoners’ Education Trust, called ‘Brain Cells‘. Tellingly, this report found that while 74% of respondents in the survey had used computers in their learning, only relatively small numbers (<50%) were accessing offline resources such as DVDs and CD ROMs, and even fewer (6%) had managed to access online resources such as LearnDirect.

However, there are powerful reasons for changing this situation, as outlined by Yvonne Thomas (Director, NOMS Cymru) in her address at the ‘Building Bridges’ conference last month. There are a number of approaches to enabling access to a wider range of resources to prisoners without compromising security, using intranets, Virtual Learning Environments, as well as CDs and DVDs. Over the coming weeks, RSC Wales will be using this blog and other channels to highlight a number of other resources and strategies which could help teachers and managers to overcome some of the barriers.

Almost every time I have been part of any discussion of learning technologies over the last several years, there has been some discussion of the best way to share teaching resources. Nearly always, someone bemoans the fact that teachers and institutions are unwilling to share the fruits of their own labours. Someone else generally also points out that there is loads of stuff ‘out there’, but most of it is irrelevant or unreliable, and how is a teacher to have time to sift through it all? These points are hard to contest, since they come directly from individual experience, and usually they elicit some sad nodding of heads around the table.

Government-sponsored initiatives in the UK have produced large banks of resources, such as the LearnDirect and National Learning Network (NLN) schemes . These have proved to have value for some learners, but there are questions about their cost-effectiveness (they are very expensive to produce), and it is hard or impossible for teachers to modify these. In Wales, the National Grid for Learning Cymryu (NGfL Cymru) continues to generate teacher-authored resources by the simple expedient of paying teachers to enhance existing resources to meet quality and interoperability standards. This is valuable and beneficial work, but the need is much greater than NGfL Cymru’s capacity to produce these resources.

What’s needed are more informal channels, and these are rapidly emerging. A potentially helpful development along these lines is the Creative Commons Licences.  A JISC briefing paper published last month shows how the range of possible licensing arrangments may be applied in an educational context, and taking into account the thorny issue of which resources are owned by institutions, and which by individual staff.

If you have never used Creative Commons, a good starting point is on the Flickr Creative Commons pages, where you can easily search for images which have been made available under CC. It’s also easy to make your own images available in this way.

Laura Walker’s blog post “Nine great reasons why teachers should use Twitter“ has caused quite a bit of interest on both sides of the Atlantic in the last couple of days. Walker is a capable advocate, and her reasons stand up very well. The comments which follow her posting are also interesting, and give an idea how divided the educational communities are on this question. I think that this reflects a long-standing dissatisfaction in many quarters recently, based on a a whole host of factors: e.g. the failure of the VLE to support conversational learning in the way that it intially promised, uncertainties about the quality of and access to free online resources, and the difficulty of creating and sustaining coherent online communities of practice amongst teachers. I could go on.

This all adds up to the feeling that there are some pieces missing from the jigsaw which will make up the online learning environment of the future. A few of us are thinking that Twitter, or something like it,  just might be an important component of our online worlds. It won’t solve the whole problem, but as Twitter acquires more users, its power to forge links between distant partners is becoming undeniable. Walker’s post, for example, reached me via London and California. Did it need to? Of course not, but it has been passed to me by someone whose views I trust, and has therefore acquired credence. And I am not sure that I know how to design a Google search which would have brought that posting to the top…