The Digital Practitioner 2011

When Digital Natives Go to College

Background; This blog post is to complement the slides Digital Practitioner 2011 on slideshare. The topic of the Digital Practitioner emerged from an LSIS survey into FE College staff capabilities during the summer of 2011. It was derived from the work of Geoff Rebbeck at Thanet College who had developed original ways of surveying staff capability and built upon by Nigel Ecclesfield, with support from Fred Garnett, who redesigned the survey in a number of ways. Geoff evolved the approach of moving beyond a quantitative survey of practitioner use of technology for learning to one based upon attitudes and feelings towards the use of technology in action. Nigel developed the survey instrument on SurveyMonkey so that it both captured practitioner attitudes and provided an opportunity for additional free-text responses.

Heutagogy and Technology Stewardship

Theory, Practice & Mobile Social Media #ece11

Background; This blog post is related to a workshop at the Education for a Changing Environment Conference at Salford University to be held at 11.30am on Friday July 8th 2011, using this presentation. The purpose of the workshop is to look at how we might embed the practices of technology stewardship within and across institutions in such a way that attendees have practical take-home messages for their institutions. You can join in using the Salford meet online link (now finished)

Theory, Practice & eTeams; The starting point for the workshop is the three-fold approach highlighted in the sub-title, Theory, Practice and mobile Social Media.

Firstly the theory is based on Nigel Ecclesfield and my writings on Architectures of Participation on this blog, which seek to identify appropriate institutional behaviours in networked post Web 2.0 worlds.

Secondly, the practice of Paul Lowe as a solitary Technology Steward at the University of the Arts proselytizing the practices of his successful M.A. in Photo-journalism.

Thirdly, Thomas Cochrane’s long-term strategic approach to embedding the use of mobile social media at Unitec, NZ by developing the idea of a technology steward representing a set of responsibilities embedded within communities of practice, eTeams, rather than being a separate identifiable role.

What is a Technology Steward? Etienne Wenger describes a Technology Steward as being the person who is capable at walking at 45 degrees between the institutional hierachies within which we work, and the flat-world affordances of networked technologies, particularly mobile technologies, what Mike Sharples calls bringing the informal into the formal. We might also see this as reflecting a similar tension between learning processes and institutional demands for assessment and administration. The Technology Steward is the person who can broker positive learning outcomes between networks and hierarchies. “Being a technology steward has very little to do with being an expert technology user, instead it’s much more about understanding the connections and interactions of human networks”

1. Heutagogy and institutional technology stewardship; this workshop is, in part, developed  from an earlier presentation given at CAL11 and outlined in the earlier Technology Steward post on this blog.

Public Value: Participation & Measurement

Valuing alternate views

If I’m setting out an alternative to the visions on public value I’ve already discussed, then I need to show how this deals with the outlines of measurement stated in “Public Value: Theory and Practice” (PVT&P), which I assume, is approved by the editors Mark Moore and John Benington. The authors of the section discussed below are Louise Horner and Will Hutton of the “Work Foundation” whose paper is entitled “Public Value, Deliberative Democracy and the role of public managers” (PVT&P pp 112-126) and it is not surprising that these views seem to have informed the recommendations made by Hutton in relation to the pay of senior staff in the UK public sector, which advised that there should be no cap on these salaries, but that the level of these salaries should be public along with a reporting of the range of salaries in the organisations employing these staff. Let’s examine the measurement  of Public Value.

Technology Stewards

CAL 2011 Manchester

Dialogue Paper; Bridging Contexts; Preparing the institution for emerging technologies

Background

This is based on a conference paper prepared for CAL11.The more up to date Slideshare Presentation is here. We examine what has been learnt from new ways of using mobile technologies and Web 2.0 tools to support learning and how that might by used to help prepare institutions to support a range of new environments for learning. As researchers we tend to look at the affordances that new technologies might offer us for learning, however in this paper we are looking at what institutions might do to provide the affordances for the adoption of new technology. We will look at both the practical work undertaken at Unitec Auckland New Zealand and their model of using both web 2.0 technologies and mobiles to “bridge learning contexts (pdf),” and also at a framework for the broader institutional adoption of mobile technologies, and then use that to refine a proposed model of the roles of Technology Stewards.

Developing the critique (Public Value)

Just as you think that Mark Moore has moved on from public value a new book co-edited with John Bennington comes along “Public Value: theory and practice” and published within the last two weeks (2011). On a very brief survey of the contents it would appear that the majority of writing on this topic emerges from university business schools in the English speaking world, particularly Warwick University, and writers on policy such as Will Hutton. What appears to be almost entirely absent (there is one exception) are any contributions from those working in public sector organisations delivering services, or from communities that receive those services. 

Public Value 2011

Public Value for Publics not Policy Makers

I finished 2010 by setting out the basis of my critique of the approaches to public value demonstrated by the mainstream discussion reflected in the approach to public value developed in the NIACE “Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning” (IFLL) which grew out of Moore‘s work in the USA, was refined by the UK Cabinet Office(pdf) and other writers in a range of different contexts, including Further Education(pdf) and the BBC, most notably the IFLL. I have argued that fundamental flaws in the arguments put forward in the literature I have reviewed are that;

1. Public value is seen, on the one hand as being a measure of consumer satisfaction with public services and reflects a view of public perception as essentially passive, and in some cases, manipulable;
2. The measure of public value is set in relation to the salaries paid to senior public officials in the original work or in other “cash” values such as the potential savings created by the beneficial impact of adult education on offenders.
3. These are proxy measures and poor ways of measuring either the impact of public services or the consequent value placed on them in private or public settings such as families, neighbourhoods, communities or wider society, let alone by individuals;

Redefining Public Value: 2010

Towards Engaging Communities; Away from Managerialism

Those of you reading the previous discussions on public value in this blog will be aware that it has focused on the way in which the term has been used by NIACE (National Institute for Adult and Continuing Education – the membership group and lobby for those providing adult and community learning in the UK).  We have been particularly concerned with the shift to an economistic model of defining public value apparent in their recent national inquiry which lead to the publication of the papers and final report for the Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning (IFLL). Without re-iterating all the details, it is apparent that NIACE chose to move away from models of public value grounded in traditions of community action and community learning in the UK and instead to adopt a model derived from the work of Moore (Mark H. Moore (1995), Creating Public Value Strategic Management in Government, Harvard University Press) in the US. This latter model was subsequently developed by the Cabinet Office under the Labour Government from 2005 and a range of UK think tanks such as Demos and The Work Foundation.  The adoption of this model by the IFLL appears to have ignored the thinking and advocacy that was aired in NIACE’s own, excellent book “Not Just the Economy: the public value of adult learning” (NIACE 2008) which was based on a more community focused model.  The use of the term public value was much more contested in this book, by writers such as Ursula Howard and Richard Bolsin and we will investigate that approach more deeply here. The writers of this blog regard a revitalised, and networked, concept of Public Value relevant to the post-web 2.0 world we live in, and a critical element in rethinking institutions and policy for the Knowledge Economy. These three posts will update our thinking on how this might be achieved, but first some background. 

Public Value – from critique to proposals

We promised to publish my proposals for a more positive view of “public value” and this is to alert you to the publication of the first part of this work on Monday 15th November 2010. This will summarise my objections to the model of public value used by NIACE in the Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning and developed from the work of Moore in the US and subsequently in the UK by the Labour Government’s Cabinet Office and the Work Foundation, as well as NIACE, in the context of adult and community learning. Following this, in the first post, I’ll be outlining my conception of “public value” and my reasons for doing so.

Since I started this series of posts we have experienced a change of Government in the UK along with a huge re-alignment of Government priorities in relation to education, training and welfare, with a catch-all term used – “The Big Society”. The result of these changes and the philosophy behind them is another discussion that will be referenced in the subsequent postings, but you are referred to the ongoing debates about this concept for greater detail, although I’m sure we will be coming back to them as we become aware of the consequences of Government action here in the UK.

The posts starting next week will follow the following sequence;

1. A short summary of the issues identified in the previous posts along with an outline of my position and reasons for wishing to keep “public value” as a means of assessing the value and impact of public activities and services rather than audit and economistic models;
2. A proposed definition of public value and the arguments for this position; and
3. An introduction to how this definition might be tested and where the evidence to support it can be identified and located.

As this is intended to be a collaborative activity, I would particularly value comments both on this blog and off-list at nefg1@gmail.com

Nigel

Towards a mobile architecture of participation

ALT-C 2010

Fred and I have been wondering for some time how to represent the ways in which mobiles affect the Architecture of Participation. A year ago we presented a paper at iPED2009 (Beyond a Boundary on Slideshare) which, in line with the conference theme of pedagogical boundaries, looked at organisational boundary issues from a range of perspectives, including mobile. Picking up on Mike Sharples theme that mobiles enable informal learning strategies to enter the classroom, what Thomas Cochrane calls “Bridging Learning Contexts,” we started looking at what a mobile Architecture of Participation might look like. Last week we  presented the attached poster (pdf) and supporting paper (.doc) at the ALT-C 2010 Conference in Nottingham to elaborate our developing ideas.

The poster seeks to look at the context for mobile learning and is based on our work both on policy (Policy 2.0) and with the Learner-Generated Contexts Group by exploring how issues such as trust and organisational learning need to be addressed in making the best of use of mobile technology for learning and participation in education.The poster is presented graphically as a series of flows to promote reflection and the paper is basically the same material presented as linear text.

In more practical terms a presentation by Thomas Cochrane at ALT-C, on strategies for mlearning integration, addressed a lot of the issues identified in our  mobile AoP and put them into practice on the B.Sc for Product Design at Unitec in Auckland, New Zealand using the concepts of the PAH Continuum and Technology Stewardship. He gave a brilliant talk at ALT-C which can be viewed on his “mlearning Prezi”.  Thomas adds in a role for Technology Stewards, as discussed by Etienne Wenger in Digital Habitats, but his key trope is involving lecturers in designing the use of mobiles, and in scaffolding that use against clear assessment outcomes. We really value this work but our concern is perhaps more at the next, strategic, level of the system investigating how these kind of imaginative, purposeful uses of mobiles can be integrated into the strategies and policies of the University (as recommended by Gilly Salmon) and thus help lead to a more participative learning process and educational system. Thomas Cochrane and Fred Garnett have since developed this aspect in their CAL11 paper on Technology Stewards.

Mobile – Architecture of Participation-submission-x

Supporting-paper-0179 Creating the right conditions for the use of mobile technology in learning

Posted by Nigel Ecclesfield

Social capital – issues with “Learning through life”

As I promised, here is the post on Ben Fine’s new book “Theories of Social Capital: Researchers behaving badly” (RBB). The reason for this slight digression from the theme of my posts on public value is that one issue I have identified in papers by Schuler and others, is an uncritical adoption of the term ‘social capital’. However this term has been addressed in great detail from the perspective of social theory and political economy through the work Fine has carried out over the last decade. The other authors who also appear to accept the term uncritically are Wilkinson and Pickett in “The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone” and as their findings and analysis help frame a number of arguments I will be making here, in the final post of this series, I felt that it was necessary to introduce Fine’s work first and then explore what this means for the discussion on public value in my final post.