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.

Survey Construction; Whilst the survey took a different, more qualitative, approach to the more typical number crunching approach (e.g. 1 PC to every 7 students) employed previously in the Becta survey of FE College use of technology, run since 2000, the outcomes were surprising. Firstly the subjective approach focussed on how users felt about their technology use in practice clearly resonated, but more surprising was the huge amount of data revealed in the free-text responses. The free-text boxes were provided to allow participants to clarify or modify their answers in case the options provided were too limiting, however they were used to provide much deeper, reflective, comments on their professional practice overall thus, unwittingly, providing a huge amount of relevant data on current professional practice. Nigel, currently experimenting with a number of Learning Analytics tools, simply sucked in all this bonus data and started analysing it. The results were refreshingly surprising.

Survey Findings; We surveyed 20 colleges and 850 practitioners overall in English FE Colleges and we found that

1. The survey methodology opened up a whole new understanding of the use of technology in college, we got a picture of professional practice.

2. The tagging of survey responses meant we could slice the data individual, by department, by college, by subject and nationally.

3. By offering survey answers based on how they used technology, how much support they needed and how they worked with colleagues we got a picture of the relationships being built as technology was introduced, tested, used and embedded in practice and then shared.

4. In the main we found college lecturers were “curious and confident” They tried technology out experimentally and, rather than seeing that learning technology started and ended with the college VLE, they would use as much or as little technology to support learning as seemed to work for them, based on their professional opinion of its pedagogic value.

Deeper Findings from Learning Analytics; With the huge amount of free text response Nigel was able to run a number of processing sequences to review the data.

1. The five key terms referred to the most were a) student b) Moodle c) resources d) college e) learning

2. The use of technology was clearly based on a student-centred approach and the choice of technology was driven by its pedagogic usefulness.

3. Much of the confidence came from the personal use of various technologies at home before using them professionally, leading us to describe this as being “when digital natives go to college”, or more clearly, as Digital Practitioners.

4. It was clear that practitioners were taking decisions on using technology for learning which was based on their expertise as professional educators and was not derived from college technology plans.

Conclusions; The notion of the professionally driven Digital Practitioner suggests we need to rethink both the way we introduce technology for learning into institutions and how personal professional development is carried out. We will expand on these ideas further.

Further information; There is more information on the Digital Practitioner 2011 slides which were prepared for the JISC e-learning experts group held on October 19th 2011. If you have any questions on the survey please ask them in the comments below and we will answer them.

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. We were inspired by Thomas Cochrane’s creative use of our PAH Continuum, presented as a table here, to help with the design of technology use on the B.A Product Design at Unitec, NZ. The LGC group think that frameworks to help the thinking of practitioners could be seen as a useful Learning Design tool, and Thomas’s use of the PAH Continuum (see his mlearning Prezi) seemed to confirm this. Inspired by this and his detailed ALT-J article on Critical Success Factors, Nigel and I thought that a similar, ‘heutagogic’ framework on Technology Stewards might help institutions adopt an Architecture of Participation and become ‘adaptive institutions’. The table below represents how we summed that up, and is the first of our three ideas for discussion. Note that we also felt it necessary to qualify the table by identifying underpinning Literacies at each level; Organisational, Learning and Digital.

Conclusion; Three Levels of Technology Stewards

Literacies;  A further requirement needed to make this work are “literacies” about the responsibilities at each level that the Technology Stewards are operating on. We feel at the Strategic level that Pro-Vice Chancellors, or equivalent on senior management teams need an Organisational Literacy, in order to understand how a technology infrastructure. Staff need to be aware of what Learning Literacy is needed to be successful at study.  Students need to be aware of the Digital Literacies necessary to be successful networked learners.

We think that this is best seen as a framework for thinking about the roles of a technology steward.

2. The practice of being a Technology Steward; Paul Lowe’s approach came from his own passionate advocacy as a Technology Steward at the University of the Arts and emerged out of a JISC workshop with Etienne Wenger on Digital Habitats. Having developed and designed an MA in Photojournalism, having been a practicing war photographer himself, he wanted to maximize the opportunities for his students to learn what he and, crucially, other skilled photographers had learnt in their practice. He found a way of doing this using the learning platform Wimba which enabled him to run sessions with famous photographers around the world, with students from the same provenance. Now an educationalist, and a practicing technology steward, who is successfully brokering between his institutional requirements and the networks of his professional practice; perhaps he is what Wenger calls a tech-mentor, Paul has sought to share his approach with us. Like Thomas Cochrane, he was enthused to share his practice because of the student engagement and learning successes that it generated.

3. Building Communities of Practice using mobile social media; On first discovering Thomas Cochrane’s work I was impressed with how he had looked at a pedagogically sound way of embedding mobile technology use for learning across a degree. As he put it the “pedagogical Integration of Mobile devices can provide a catalyst for pedagogical change towards a social constructivist pedagogy facilitating student-generated content and student-generated contexts beyond the classroom.” It was interesting how he matched both an evolving use of mobile technology, and an increasing degree of student self-management, to an evolving approach to assessment, over the four years of the B.A in Product Design. However in the same way that Mike Wesch enables his students to do make amazing videos in his Digital Ethnography classes by working with his University admin to allow it, Thomas had spent four years developing a strategic approach to the use of mobile technologies and in identifying Critical Success Factors. Then in embedding mobile use for learning Thomas also used a Community of Practice approach, embedding and distributing further responsibilities across course teams; action research, continuing professional development and co-design of technology use.

Workshops with Etienne Wenger; Interestingly both Thomas Cochrane and Paul Lowe ran workshops with Wenger at their institutions around the ideas in his work on Digital Habitats and looking at what a Technology Steward might do. Not everyone can do this of course, but in each case they used the workshops and events as springboards for reviewing how they used technology for learning, what roles differing people might play and how they might change institutional strategies.

Suggested take-home strategies; In terms of how this workshop is structured obviously we see three basic strategies;

Theoretical; bringing together a range of approaches in an enabling framework,

Practical; in terms of individual responsibilities that build on good practice,

Strategic one aimed at addressing several institutional issues underpinned by embedding a community of practice approach in course teams.

Based on my experiences and Thomas’s practice I would add the heuristic that you can enable organizational change by solving problems that the institution doesn’t know it has yet.  For Thomas it was developing a mobile learning strategy well before mobiles went mainstream in terms of use for learning. In the UK it might be how to engage students when they become more critical consumers of education in a post-Browne world. Make the learning experience more engaging, more contemporary, more aligned with practice in the global market-place and, of course, more exciting.

Workshop Issues; which of these three approaches inspires you? What ideas within them sound most useful? How might you take them back to your institution and make them happen.

You might want to consider organizing workshops, bringing in guest speakers such as Wenger, or others, so you can debate these issues with colleagues.

You might want to look to get a Technology Steward(s) appointed with clear roles and responsibilities acting as evangelist for new modes of learning based on their own practice.

You might want to focus on course teams or course planning and take a Community of Practice approach with a number of ancillary concerns in terms of responsibilities, planning, co-design, student-generated content, student-generated contexts.

You might want to share your emerging practice in the professional communities to which you feel a part of.

You might want to raise discussions with PVC Learning and Teaching on how to change, develop, or extend existing practice based on the above

Comments & Questions; welcome below.

References for this workshop;

Join via Elluminate (no longer active)

Slideshare presentation supporting workshop

Thomas Cochrane on e-Teams (Google Doc)

Prezis on mlearning & Critical Success Factors

Thomas Cochrane’s Blog

Caroline Haythornthwaite on New Forms of Doctorate in a networked world

Fuller discussion of the PAH Continuum

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.

Horner and Hutton are concerned with two aspects of measuring public value;

• “the first is whether an absolute measure can be derived; and whether this can be translated into a monetary value. (They see this as drawing on democratic and economic theory) (PVT&P p123)
• the second is the adequacy of performance management frameworks and whether they fully capture what public bodies do and the extent to which they involve the public in decisions.” (PVT&P p123) Mechanisms for involving the public are not explored neither are the critiques of performance management in both the UK and US – See Radin 2009

They argue that economic theory, while having something to contribute to questions of value and social choice, does not have “much” to contribute to questions of value and public choice as it does not deal adequately with how people arrive at choices, which they see as going beyond simple monetary incentives (PVT&P p123). The unanswered questions are related to, what they describe, as intangibles, or values such as fairness, incidentally seen as “not easily rendered through the price mechanism. They see this paradox as being solved through – “It is thus the processes of democracy themselves that help ascertain what is valuable.” They quote Moore (Moore 1995) to support their view –

“We should evaluate the efforts of public sector managers not in the economic marketplace of individual consumers, but in the political marketplace of citizens and the collective decisions of representative democratic institutions.” (ibid p123)

By using the term marketplace in the context of citizenship and economics reveals Horner and Hutton’s reliance on economic models that have narrowed down consideration of sociological issues to relations in market mechanisms. In this, as in the uses of the term social capital, considered by Fine in his critique of the development and use of that term, market mechanisms are seen as the governing rationale for social and political behaviour, a reductionist blind alley. The focus on the efforts of public sector managers is itself problematic and I will explore this below, suffice to say that it is rarely the activities of managers, in PVT&C this is always senior managers, that impact directly on the public.

As I have argued in previous posts, this pre-eminent concern with the managers in public services ignores the following;

• representative democracy, cited by Moore as a source of evaluation of the effort of public sector managers, is increasingly unrepresentative in terms of the numbers voting in local and national elections. Local elections struggle to enthuse/engage more than 35% of the electorate and even national by-elections struggle to exceed this figure. Even at general elections with turnouts in the UK of around 60% of the electorate show that winners enjoy support of substantially less than 50% of their constituencies and at national level, no single party represents a majority of the electorate and voting is seen, not as a participative act in an on-going engagement, by individuals, with political processes, but as a bidding process by political parties to attract the key marginal votes that swing election results.
• The overwhelming engagement with public services on a day to day basis is not with public sector managers, who it can be argued are too busy managing relations with governments, funding bodies and policy makers, but with public sector workers who provide services to individuals and communities, the so-called “front-line staff”.
• In the public value literature, value emerges in terms of economic costs of providing and managing public services and the accuracy of managers in meeting policy objectives and key performance indicators, while demonstrating the satisfaction of individuals with these services. Recent history across two governments in the UK shows how flexible and unrepresentative of public views these policies have been and the weaknesses of the approach taken by Moore, Horner and Hutton is that it is so easily co-opted to be used for the commercialisation of services. Even the case of the BBC, used to support Horner and Hutton’s views is scarcely one that does more than act as a set of selection criteria in a framework that is not participative, but firmly consumerist. The recent appointment of the Chair of the BBC Governors shows that public views and debate have played no part in the process of determining who will call this publically funded organisation to account.
• In determining public value Moore, Horner and Hutton avoid any consideration of participative political engagement and thus ignore the work of communities and of the vast majority of public sector workers and their representative bodies, the trade unions, who provide another means of assessing the effectiveness of public services and respond both to the mandate of ensuring that their members are able to work in safety although, not necessarily with financial security as well as attempting to voice wider concerns coming from their members. Engagement of public sector workers with the public ought to be a sine qua non of services providing public value and a source of development of those services as their engagement with the public is both real and immediate. Giving more weight to those engaged in direct delivery and their local engagements might be more helpful to service users than targets and performance indicators that are conditioned by political objectives that are implemented through increased centralisation of the control of funding tying organisations to allocated resources via targets imposed through audit processes. As Alexander found in his work with communities around design of community facilities in architecture a key indicator was the emergence of pattern languages around individual projects, which focused on communities. The real public value in terms of architectural designs meeting community needs, came through public participation in defining services and the criteria for success and how, for professionals, their engagement with communities opened their eyes to what was valuable and needful to be done. What was also characteristic of these projects, was the continuing engagement of communities in public activity, a point emphasised by Schuler and the “Spirit Level “ in their analyses of the impact of equality as an underlying factor in the operation of social and political processes and national indices. Alexander’s work loosened the professionals’ ties to centralised and bureaucratised ways of working to enable them to appreciate the validity of public views arrived at in concerted actions rather than choices made through polls and surveys where choices are defined in the necessarily limited language of ballot papers and manifestos and the supporting contexts of political actions and policy formation by “experts”. See Schuler 2008
• In this environment of power, seen as arrived at through periodic balloting of “populations”, the delegation of action is through a reactive public sector seen as the agency of political authority, there to follow political directives issued as performance indicators and its associated budgetary control. The possibilities of generative actions, initiated in communities arising from and developed at local level, does not seem to be considered in the demonstration and measurement of public value presented by Horner and Hutton.

Our perspective would suggest that public value seen from the perspective of managers or measured through performance outcomes or outputs (See Norman 2011) reinforces the idea that the value in public activities are determined through a policy formation process that is a specialist activity requiring limited, “consultative” input from those affected i.e. service users, provider organisations and, on occasion, practitioners. The recent “pause”, by the Government in the UK, to consult workers in the National Health Service nearly twelve months after the proposed reforms were announced and six months after the draft legislation started its passage through the legislatory process is a clear example of the disconnect between policy making and workers along with the wider community. In the same way, the practical effects of policy are, what we would call, community blind, giving primacy to financial impacts. The results of this narrow focus show up disproportionate damage to local services and community engagement that are particularly felt in communities with little access to those who formulate policy and determine financial controls to implement that policy.

Since 1979 there has been a concentration of power within Government in the UK within our ministry of finance the “Treasury” whose prescriptions have skewed most policies in terms of a market (economic) model that has been unchallenged by Governments and that, overall, has supported perspectives that are inimical to public services and seek to transfer costs and institutional controls out of the public sector to less representative agencies such as charities and private contractors governed by contract and limited performance measures rather than accountability to communities and service users where priorities might be determined locally. You might say this could be described as “central control – local delivery” where what is delivered and how it is evaluated is in terms of performance targets and consumer ratings, typically through surveys rather than direct engagement.

While we wouldn’t deny the need for national representation, policy makers and politicians are drawn, under current arrangements, into environments that are both limited in terms of those who have access to policy makers and in terms of the their contact with and engagement with the broad range of institutions, their staff and communities. Moore’s model of public value runs the danger of proposing that senior public service managers become a substitute for active representative arenas armed with survey data to describe what their communities need and they, not their wider services and engagements, are the constituency that matters in determining the value of public activities. The model is supported by the view that managers should be rewarded in ways that increasingly distance them from service delivery and focus on “managing up” i.e. making links to Government, the achievement of financial targets and their management of consumer views their principal activities.

These issues are recognised by Swilling in PVT&P e.g. in the context the “Developmental State” where he states “Autonomy and embeddedness must go together – the one without the other compromises the nature of the developmental state because autonomy without embeddedness means disconnection from the knowledge flows crucial to policy, and embeddedness without autonomy runs the danger of capture by special interests to the detriment of general interest.” p101 While this is recognised within the context of the developing economies and national states of the 1960’s the consequences of this at local level now, is not explored as at these levels the interaction between historical, political and cultural currents in specific locations would present a more problematic context for generalisation about public value e.g. progress in gender equality vis a vis economic development. As Fine noted in his critique of social capital, underneath this analysis is the accepted primacy of economic thinking as the predominant means of providing analysis and solutions to social and political problems whether it is the neo-liberal discourse, ecological economics or institutional economics all of which share, at heart, a reductionist and consumerist basis to their thinking.

Further reading of PVT&P convinces me that the business school focus and engagements of all the contributors blinds them to the pervasiveness of the model(s) they use and to its essential limitations as a means for determining public value grounded, as it is, in the idea that public value is led rather than developed through community engagement and that current models of representation in local or national politics are both appropriate and enabling of public value.

What we offer, in contrast, is a model of learning and knowledge which gives much more priority to the knowledge and experiences of locales, situations and community over disembodied expertise imported/imposed through political processes that rarely reflect or represent those subject to political action i.e. the ideology of the representative democracy based on all or nothing views of legitimation and the right of incumbent politicians to initiate actions and to impose their views throughout their terms of office.

As O’Neill argued in 1971 our environment is full of “monuments to financial cunning and the fear of the future, which wastes peoples’ lives.” (O’Neill 1971 p 37). This is manifest in the lack of trust of community and locality. This was brought home to me very strongly in a BBC interview with community activists in Southern Sudan on 28^th May 2011 in the “Today” programme, where the Sudanese were pointing out that NGOs working in Juba were among other things, employing ex-patriot workers to undertake administrative and support roles that could be carried out by local people, whose income would be deployed locally, and that these same ex-patriot workers were housed in luxury hotels owned by overseas interests and supported with security guards and four-wheel drive vehicles even if their roles seldom took them outside of urban locations. A little research on the NGOs working in Southern Sudan, shows that a number of the most prominent use the term public value to justify their activities, although much of this work tends to be at the behest of overseas agencies (the funders) rather than local people. As Tess Lea’s work in Northern Australia found (reported in her book “Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts (Lea 2008)), the rhetoric of public services combined with the increasing adoption of the language and methods of business had not addressed the health issues of Aboriginal communities identified as being of concern to government and these health issues persisted despite the activity of managers and other professionals. Lee explores the paradox of managerialism in remote working and offers a bleak insight into how intervention using managerial models fails to achieve its aims as one of the key issues is lack of knowledge of professionals about the communities they are working in and the stress that isolation and remote working cause, leading to professionals leaving employment after very short stays in their posts. Nevertheless, Lee notes that despite the statistical evidence showing little progress in terms of health indicators of indigenous communities in Northern Australia, the belief in the positive impact of the interventions initiated by government persists despite the clear evidence to the contrary.

What we might draw from this is the contradictions that arise when methods and models developed by “experts” are implemented as solutions to the “problems identified by those who have invested much in their role as managers and “experts” and who see their responsibilities to the hierarchy and its associated funding stream rather than those who are subject to their actions.

In contrast, Sugata Mitra found, in his work around the world, the capacity of groups and communities to adopt, adapt and use information technology to support learning is far greater than the expectations of those outside the communities provided with the technology see Mitra 2010 and the discussion in the same issue of BJET. With a focus on learning, attention moves away from those who provide resources to what can be generated by communities and the implications of that learning rather than on audit trails and activities that are governed by managerial and hierarchical relationships. It is interesting to try to find accounts of challenge or critique of existing models of governance and accountability in the public value literature. As noted in much of my commentary there are no feedback loops into policy from Public Value proponents, the role of public workers is seen to be manage expectations and operate within existing policy frameworks, even if these might not be viable or violate the wishes of communities. Without a clear notion of how public value is to be seen and developed in conflicting environments is, at its roots, what its ethical and political stance might be, the work of Moore and others in PVT&P reverts to the production of management texts and the messiness of publics is hidden in the abstractions.

Users of the term are drawn into their support for the status quo and its definitions of formal representation with its mechanisms of policy formation and implementation even when there are few examples of truly popular representatives who have been elected by a simple majority of the population as a whole.

Another problem with public value analyses is that they are resolutely one-dimensional in their consideration of the different aspects of the concept e.g. Crouch 2010 sees public and private sectors on a continuum, but his model looks at the private in abstract, without addressing how issues of identity such as gender, ethnicity and other forms of association, such as religious affiliation, affect social and political actions at individual and community level. One of the reasons for this, is I suspect, the requirement for managers in the public sector in the US, UK and elsewhere to seek to incorporate views and evidence within existing models of provision and services, because the funding models used since the late 1970s are not seen as open to review or critique as they “are” and thus any changes to funding models, despite the rhetoric, do not address the underlying problems created by managerialism, audit and accounting processes. The apt metaphor for this is ossification as changing needs or circumstances are very difficult to respond to as public activity becomes locked/stuck inside audit processes that are less and less amenable to public influence although locking public services into rigid structures for allocating and assessing the outcomes of public services and those working within them is often a requirement of audit and inspection processes within public services. It is not, therefore, surprising that the period from 1970’s to the present has seen the ever greater adoption of audit and financial terminology to describe the activities of public services and their staff and of the fashionable approaches to quality improvement derived from industry e.g. lean management, Sigma 6 and many others that focus on very limited conceptions of cost and outcomes derived from a consumer focus that is about increasing consumption and brand loyalty rather than the social and environmental impacts of corporate activity. Despite the inconsistencies and failure of these approaches e.g. lean management at Toyota, where, in the period 2009-11 massive failures in quality assurance, design and customer relations led to the recall of 9 million vehicles. Despite this, the proponents of these methods insist that the failure is failure of execution rather than the failure of the method itself. A look at the literature on lean management will demonstrate how little of the literature has reported research data that can be said to meet requirements for ethical and systematic research or provide information that can be validated in public forums. (A useful forum for presenting and discussing the requirements of an ethical research can be found in Ben Goldacre’s blog and column “Bad Science”).

What is interesting in the literature on Public Value so far is how little evidence is presented or cited by the authors let alone that which might meet the standards of research found and required in other fields. In PVT&P there are no detailed data presented to support any of the papers and, where a case study is presented on a primary school in Birmingham, there is no data and no clear reference to people or communities. Actions are described at an abstract level and the success is seen as being “recognised” by politicians although the influence on pupils and their families and communities is not specified in any detail and it is very hard to get beyond the head teacher and his notions of leadership to find out what others contributed to the school that was deeply connected to its communities. PVT&P pp 244-55

In contrast we would offer the following;

1. Public value is not measureable in terms of cash equivalence as these measures tend, as in the projections of savings arising from prison education reviewed in a previous post, to rest on a combination of assertion and projection that cannot stand up to detailed scrutiny, not least as the basis of the calculations changes both within and across the terms of office of governments and local bodies. We would suggest that measures used in European research such as participation in post-school education and community-based activity and, more importantly, the density and longevity of community organisations and those measures of equality used in the “Spirit Level”;
2. Density of networking can and should be shown and explored in detail. In the PV literature it is reported as a given and rarely explored to see if the assertions about the local networks are supported on the ground.
3. User attitudes need to be explored for what it is that is understood by participants in using or providing public services. This exploration needs to move beyond consumer surveys and be sensitive to local voices. There are few studies in the PV canon to date that take this work seriously as this would shift the focus away from managers and policy makers/developers.
4. Measures of responsiveness – are not considered and we would argue that a clear measure of public value would be the extent to which users and front-line staff are enabled to respond to short-term and long-term needs and assess the effectiveness of those responses in their terms rather than those developed to meet financial audit requirements.
5. Measures of employee/practitioner and user engagement – there is clearly scope for looking at participation and awareness measures such as the generation and use of pattern languages and community engagement measures that fall outside the consideration of PV writers. Their lack of consideration of the front-line workers in public services is particularly shocking and often condescending e.g. PVT&P p248 where Winkley uses the following – “The school increasingly became a proactively participant enterprise to which governors, parents, the pupils themselves as well as the sometimes forgotten back-up staff could significantly contribute.” How these forgotten staff could and did contribute is not recorded.
6. Articulation of community needs – There are no examples I have come across so far of actions to determine community needs that could be tested by replication in comparable circumstances or case studies, in this literature, showing how personal and community engagement has been encouraged in order to allow communities to develop their own measures of public value for their circumstances. As with the IFLL, the starting point is always the acceptance of the value and legitimacy of the manager and his/her political drivers and targets in providing down and reporting up
7. Creation of forums for engagement and planning – Listing different forums and exploring how they operate would provide a means of showing public activity and its outcomes and, I would guess, that those communities having wider and more intensively connected public forums would demonstrate ways in which outcomes of value to real publics e.g. neighbourhoods or those with particular needs are achieved.
8. Ability to draw on a wide range of individuals and their knowledge and experience – This is critical in the sense that public services draw in to their activities a wide range of specialists in terms of practice, management and audit control. The PV model presented by Moore focuses on the management and policy in public service to the almost total exclusion of front-line workers with the result that their consideration of public value misses out those who could provide more detailed feedback on practical outcomes. Service users as consumers take centre stage in a similar way, to the exclusion of a consideration of their role as participants and co-creators. Our model and the experience of the use of the tool we developed called the Policy Forest convinces us that PV and current conceptions of policy formation and evaluation in the US, UK and other countries misses out on the contributions of professionals and other front-line workers and of participants drawn from the public. Using the Policy Forest and similar tools would enable a more developed analysis of the views the “front-line” and bring those views into policy making.

This is the final post on PV for now, but we would like readers to contribute to this discussion now that the PV model has been revamped in PVT&P and appropriated by a single management school in the UK. My point in writing about PV and Social Capital is that these terms are used as a policy veneer for managerial and economistic models of social activities and public services that do a particular disservice to service users by considering them as consumers (mostly passive opinion givers rather than shapers), public service workers who are seen mostly in the light of their duty to their managers and disembodied audit processes and to communities whose knowledge and opinions are seen as needing to be shaped rather than acknowledged and engaged with in collaborative processes. Managers themselves are equally damaged by this process in drawing their approbation and legitimacy from party political processes and managing upwards rather than giving their attention to the people who use and provide the services they are supposed to be responsible for.

Over the last twenty years or more governments all over the world have been encouraged to focus on the needs of managers and leaders and their training has been shaped by “business” understanding and processes. Despite this focus Lea and many others have shown that these models are unsustainable at many levels and have created and maintained practices that are damaging to individuals and the environment as well as those who may be the focus of such services. A good example of this has been the abject failure of law makers, law enforcement and the courts – seen by Moore and others as a public service – in dealing with domestic and gendered violence, an issue all too pertinent in recent days in Essex in the UK. By accepting the use of the term “public value” drawn from managerial perspectives espoused by Moore, Bennington and others contributing to discussions in PVT&P, in the UK Cabinet Office and IFLL we compound these problems and fail to create a space for a more collaborative and public oversight of public services and the creation and implementation of policy that involves us all as active publics and communities rather than voting fodder for party machines.

Nigel Ecclesfield

20th June 2011

References and Links

Bennington J and Moore M. 2011 “Public Value: Theory and Practice”, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke

Horner L and Hutton W. 2011 “Public Value, Deliberative Democracy and the role of public managers” in Bennington J and Moore M (eds) PVT&P pp 112-126

Norman R. 2011 “Redefining ‘Public Value’ in New Zealand’s performance management system: managing outcomes while accounting for outputs” in Bennington J and Moore M (eds) PVT&P pp 202-211

Swilling M. 2011 “Greening Public Value: The Sustainability Challenge” in Bennington J and Moore M (eds) PVT&P pp 89-111

Winkley J. 2011 “Public Value in Education: a case study” in Bennington J and Moore M (eds) PVT&P pp 244-255

Goldacre B 2011 “Bad Science” weblog http://www.badscience.net/ link active on 20^th June 2011

Lea T. 2008 “Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: indigenous health in Northern Australia” UNSW Press, Sydney, Australia

Mitra S and Dangwal R. 2010 “Limits to self-organising systems of learning – The Kalikuppam experiment” British Journal of Educational Technology 41, 5 pp 672-688

O’Neill J. 1971 “Public and Private Space” in “Sociology as a Skin Trade”, Heinemann, London. pp 20-37

Radin B. 2009 “Challenging the performance movement: accountability, complexity and democratic values”, Georgetown University Press, Washington D.C.

Schuler D. 2008 “Liberating Voices: a pattern language for communication revolution” MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts

Tags

Policy, public value approaches, political representation, community, action, pattern languages, learning, self-organising, policy formation, Policy Forest, collaboration, co-creation

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.

Discussion

Multiple Contexts for Learning; Beyond the Classroom

The Beyond The Classroom(doc) report (2009) was an expert review of the evidence gathered in the REVEEL eduserv project on “What is the evidence for the evidence for the effectiveness of post-16 e-learning?” It’s recommendations were structured for key stakeholders such as Vice-Chancellors. One recommendation was that they should “support the use of multiple contexts for learning.” How this might be achieved was not examined but it was recognised that HE institutions lacked mechanisms for recognising and supporting new learning environments.

Maturity of Tech Infrastructure as inhibiting new technology take-up

In the Literature Review of the Use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education Conole and Alevizou (2010) examine how Web 2.0 tools have been taken-up and used in various HE institutions, but they also identify a number of factors that inhibit new technology take-up. Web 2.0 tools represent a useful proxy example of the problems in the institutional adoption of known new technologies as they have been available for learning some years without being embedded satisfactorily into everyday use.

As well as recognising that they have participatory affordances which set fresh pedagogical challenges Conole & Alevizou identify two key critical factors (amongst others) in the lack of successful adoption of Web 2.0 in HE, namely both ‘the maturity of the technological infrastructure to levels of adoption’ and existing ‘teaching cultures.’

Technology Stewards as Action Researchers in Communities of Practice

Cochrane (2010) reports on a model of course development based on course teams being put together using a ‘technology steward’ (Wenger 2009), to help identify new technologies which can support learning using a pedagogical framework for identifying the learning purpose of relevant technologies.

This has created a pro-active ‘teaching culture’ within the course teams, where teachers readily adopt new learning technologies, and which seems to address the ‘teaching culture’ problem identified by Conole.

Whilst celebrating the effectiveness of the new technology adoption Cochrane also identifies that the key “to mlearning sustainability” and the continually evolving use of new technologies as being “the development of an institutional cultural and strategic shift” to support this.

Conclusions; Digital Habitats and mobile Architectures of Participation

We believe that elements of these required shifts can be found in the proposed ‘Mobile Architecture of Participation‘ as Ecclesfield (2010) argues that, in part, the strategic ability to develop ‘the maturity of the technological infrastructure’ is a key attribute of enabling the use of new mobile technologies within HEIs.

In the light of Cochrane’s experience of the value of a collaborative approach to designing the use of new technologies, critically supported by a technology steward, by the course team using a pedagogic framework in designing the integrated use of both Web 2.0 tools and mlearning within a degree we believe we can apply a similarly collegiate approach at the strategic level.

The mobile Architecture of Participation (mAoP) identifies some of the institutional shifts that could facilitate a greater embedding of mobile use, part of which includes the use of a ‘maturity framework’ to help with the adoption of new technologies. However the mAoP doesn’t examine how the institutional management culture might be energised with the inclusion of a ‘Technology Steward’ at the strategic level to facilitate the adoption process.

In fact in Digital Habitats Wenger is actually arguing for institutional ‘technology stewards’ and we will argue that applying this at the strategic level as part of senior management teams might help the recognition of the value of new environments for learning. Supported by an overall maturity framework for new technology adoption, and as part of an overall organisational Architecture of Participation (Ecclesfield 2008), a Technology Steward at the strategic level might effect a similar transformation in the management culture to that achieved to the ‘teaching culture’ at Unitec. In this way HEI’s might develop the institutional affordances for the adoption of new technologies as they emerge variously from research labs, the open source community and commercial organisations.

Conclusion; Pedagogical Integration of Mobile devices

In Beyond the Yellow Brick Road (2010) Cochrane sums up his learning from the pedagogical integration of mobile devices by saying that it, which has focussed on bridging learning contexts by saying that ‘can provide a catalyst for pedagogical change towards a social constructivist pedagogy facilitating student-generated content and student-generated contexts beyond the classroom.’

Conclusion; Three Levels of Technology Stewards

Literacies;  A further requirement needed to make this work are “literacies” about the responsibilities at each level that the Technology Stewards are operating on. We feel at the Strategic level that Pro-Vice Chancellors, or equivalent on senior management teams need an Organisational Literacy, in order to understand how a technology infrastructure. Staff need to be aware of what Learning Literacy is needed to be successful at study.  Students need to be aware of their Digital Literacies.

References;

de Boulay B., Garnett F., Luckin R., 2009 Beyond the Classroom Report, REVEEL, www.reveel.ac.uk (accessed 7/10/2010)

Cochrane, T., 2010, Exploring Mobile Learning Success Factors, ALT-J Vol. 18 No. 2, Abingdon

Cochrane T., 2010, Beyond the Yellow Brick Road, ALT-J Vol 18 No. 3, Abingdon

Conole G., & Alezeviou P., 2010 Literature Review of the Use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education, HEA, Milton Keynes

Ecclesfield N & Garnett F., & , 2010, Towards a mobile Architecture of Participation,, ALT-C, Nottingham

Ecclesfield N. & Garnett F., 2008, Colloquim; A organisational Architecture of Participation, BJET Vol. 39 No. 3

Garnett F. & Lowe P., 2011, Three Levels of Technology Steward, unpublished discussion paper.

Wenger E., N. White & J. Smith, 2009, Digital habitats, Stewarding technology for communities. Portland OR: CP Square

Theme; Explore how emerging technologies from diverse fields (e.g. gaming, AI, biotech, ubiquitous computing) might offer new environments for learning

Keywords: Mobile learning, Technology stewards, Architecture of participation

I will go through the book and explore its contents in detail, but apart from a new focus cleaving to community consultation and democratic politics there is a lot of theory in which some discussion of practice is embedded and a small number of case studies appended.

This appears to be a move on from the position I have been criticising in previous posts, but the issue stills seems to be moving writers on this topic from formal consultation to engagement with publics seen in a wider frame than that of citizen, so that what is presented below, seems to me to continue to be justified in the light of public value being presented as a management and technocratic policy issue in this book. I will add a post on the contents of “Public Value: theory and practice” as soon as I can and explore the development of this approach outlined in the contributions.

In this post I outline my key objections to this managerial approach and try to support my assertions, in bold text, with further discussion.

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;

Moore’s work on public value starts from a premise that there is a relatively simple correlation between the value placed on public services by publics and/or communities (the distinction is never clarified or explored) and the levels of wages or salary paid to public servants.  As with the proponents of social capital, there is an assumption here that market forces are in operation and that salaries paid reflect the value of the work being undertaken.  This ignores history and cultural traditions that give rise to very differing views about the range and scope of public services and their underlying rationale e.g. Danish views on the value of education and its costs (see the discussion on the Danish Ministry of Education website (it is in English) are very different to those governing the funding of public education in California (see Walker 2010).

Even in apparently similar communities there are huge variations in the value placed on public services and salaries paid.  In the UK we have seen increasing disparities in public sector salaries where senior officials have been recruited to run services on “business lines” and recruited from the private sector with salaries that exceed those of their lowest paid colleagues by factors of 30 to 40 times and we have the irony of the Work Foundation (Reference here) working to limit the differential to “no more than  20 times the salary of the lowest paid”. What this says is that the salaries paid for work in the public sector are not reflective of public attitudes and participation in debates around the value of public services, but reflect the political realities in particular communities and the relative power of institutions such as local government and its associated patronages and national public bodies overseen by job holders appointed by and drawn from the political circles of the government of the day.

The public are further distanced from the determination of salaries in most public sector bodies as the values are determined by formulae or comparisons developed by private sector consultancies and these are implemented by senior politicians and senior executives, not debated or contested in public forums such as council meetings or readily open to public scrutiny even in the era of “Freedom of Information”.

Public engagement with the development of public services is increasingly limited to participation in surveys and marketing activities that measure individual satisfaction ratings drawing on externally determined measures such as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) set by Government or so called value for money criteria which encourages people to evaluate the quality of services they use against the personal costs to themselves rather than assessing the wider impacts of those services on neighbourhoods or communities and the overall quality of life in a society. Thus the focus shifts away from the quality of the service to its cost, with this taking priority over needs and public engagement with the formulation of priorities.

Seen from the perspective of Moore and those developing his ideas, public value is defined by the actions of senior managers in public services and their ability to influence publics to maximise their personal value as reflected in their salaries and status. Caught between the requirements of inspection and audit procedures the value of the activities of their institutions is seen as best demonstrated through consumer satisfaction ratings at the expense of the co-development and co-creation of services through engagement with the service activities and their methods of delivery. By focussing on consumer ratings the problem of the validity and value of services is not considered as problematic and the authors of papers in the IFLL do not describe how service development is achieved without feedback and development cycles built in to the processes of consultation or how the value is assessed in relation to wider outcomes for families, and communities or in work settings.

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.  In both cases, I would argue that these are both 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;

I have outlined my concerns about the worth of using the salaries of senior officers in public services as a measure of the value placed by publics on the services managed by these individuals, not least because these salaries are rarely, if ever, set via public or corporatist mechanisms such as Whitley councils in the UK, as occurred from the 1950s to 1970s.

The other major issue in responding to salary-based indices is the low levels of public engagement in the election and management of public services. Turnout in local elections has been declining in the UK and USA over the last fifty years and often struggles to reach 30% when these elections do not coincide with national polls. In the most recent by-election in the UK for a place in the national parliament, the turnout, at a time of concern about the direction of Government economic policy, was only 48%. What this demonstrates, along with the relatively poor turnout at the recent mid-term elections in the USA, is that less than 50% of the publics eligible to vote in local and national elections exercise their rights and that at a local level even fewer people are engaged beyond periodic voting. For many communities the level of engagement is much lower as poor incomes and issues of ethnicity and culture preclude engagement in public services even where such communities may be in receipt of high levels of public expenditure in terms of both services and policing.

Even where publics demonstrate a high level of engagement in local politics countervailing influences such as the interests of private sector employers, trade unions and other influences such as religious affiliation have strategic and other effects on elected representatives and officials. Other geographical and demographic influences including the effects of the local cost of living, historical levels of political activism and the influence of economic developments such as declining or relocating employment all have very specific effects that influence pay practice in any given location.

That there is a need to examine the way in which public services operate to both meet the political and policy imperatives of incumbent governments at local and national levels, the resulting disempowerment of publics in the formulation and operation of policy and then to identify, in the context of education, how learners and the wider public can become the source of the criteria used to assess public value.  For me, this means that learners and others with a need to engage with institutions start to be seen as participants rather than passive recipients of service provision. So we need to envisage and develop models that move beyond those that are dependent on the existing processes that fail to promote active engagement in the formulation, evaluation and validation of public services.

It may have struck those of you getting to this point with me that one issue I have not covered in the discussion so far is what the authors I have reviewed see as being the role and benefits derived from public services. With the exceptions noted, services are seen in the context of the remits given to them by central government and the value placed on them in the context of national policy and legislation. This results in discussions that take the activities of the service as a given e.g. Mager’s paper where the concern is to improve public satisfaction with existing provision and “manage” that process. The other approach is to calculate, using historic costs, the implications of current expenditure in the future e.g. IFLL Public Value Paper 2 – Matrix Group. Despite the evidence of how frequently policy has adjusted both costing and the definition of desired outcomes in UK adult education e.g. the move from Blunkett’s vision in 2000 to the responses to the Leitch Report in 2007-08 to prioritise a limited skills agenda. There is evidence that changes in national economies and globalisation as well as developments in technology have already rendered the current Government emphasis on skills obsolete in the UK and that the national policies are creating barriers to local initiatives to address local needs.

These backward approaches to policy development and implementation reinforce an audit based view of management where targets are set with reference to public feedback on their experience of current or recent provision with little done to engage publics in processes to envisage and provide resources to meet the needs of their families and communities in the future. The role for managers in the public sector is generally to show how their services meet historical targets (KPIs) set at some distance in the past and then respond to new targets they have had very little input to, let alone their publics. The result of this approach has been to see a withdrawal of publics from participation and engagement occasioned by the current barriers to participation created by the way in which public services are operated and the public’s disillusion with their marginal role and/or exclusion from the management and development of public services. The end result of this is a cycle of development of public services controlled by central government or their agents in the private sector that is perpetually behind developments in the world at large and focussed on cost at the expense of value. In this business focussed view, users of public services are envisaged as consumers, a point I will explore below.

For disadvantaged and marginalised groups who are the subjects of public services and rarely engaged with as citizens or publics, the formulations of public value I have discussed until now are unlikely to have any relevance as these same groups have little or no political influence.  Readers of previous posts will know how critical I have been of approaches to public value that encourage leaders of provider institutions to manipulate their “publics” perceptions to maximise the satisfaction ratings in the context of public audit activities such as inspection and, as a consequence, see public value as a managerial issue rather than one of participation and engagement.  Far too often, public value of services for the marginalised is seen as a cost offsetting exercise and this becomes the criterion that defines public value.

In the Matrix paper on calculating the value of adult learning in the context of work with offenders, they offer a calculation which shows how much might be saved by the provision of adult learning to offenders in the long-term reduction of their re-offending. Based on recent historical evidence they seek to show the potential savings that might be achieved and, in the opinion of this writer, those savings are pretty meagre!

The paper seems to assume that current and historical conditions used to make the calculation are likely to apply over the period they use and that these conditions are, in some way generalisable across a prison population that has changed and will continue to change as any of the following affect personal and community outcomes;

1. Reductions in the availability of employment due to economic factors such as globalisation and changing Government policies (This is a discussion that I would like to explore with readers and might develop outside the scope of these posts)
2. The changing nature of the prison population, in the UK with more offenders held in prison population as a result of their mental health as for the nature of their offences. Using the arguments advanced in this paper the logic might be to argue for prison as a public value in offsetting the cost of provision for mental health although this is not the comprehensive provision it is argued we currently need. (There are huge issues in the US system arising from the disproportionate incarceration of black and migrant offenders and the privatisation of the prison services in many states. It is not possible to explore those issues here, but those with an interest might like to start with Walker’s paper where he looks at the impact of penal policy in California.  Walker R 2010 The Golden State Adrift, New Left Review 66 – Nov/Dec 2010)
3. The changing nature of employment itself which Leitch and others argue requires changes of employment and skills at intervals in any working life (moving those currently in employment through 3 or more jobs/work roles during their working lives).
4. The extent to which offenders are supported prior to release and the public services available to them on release.  It is apparent that, for the foreseeable future, public services and employment opportunities will reduce and the result, based on long-term evidence, is that employment for ex-offenders will reduce.

Taking these and current political attitudes to penal policy into account, the gains predicted by Matrix are unlikely to be seen to come to fruition. As with similar quasi-empirical predictions of outcomes based on a limited run of historical data the benefits outlined by the IFLL papers are limited and the analyses seeks to avoid controversy, by assuming that the norm used in the calculations is likely to remain so. As Bruce Cockburn, the Canadian singer observed in 1989 “The trouble with normal is, it always gets worse”. The end result of these papers and the strand developed in IFLL is that it has become apologetic for adult and community learning and sufficiently cowed by Government policies to avoid putting forward alternatives that address the future we know is coming and promote a future where learners and practitioners start to create and evaluate policy rather than being simply consumers of what is prioritised by governments with their limited agendas which, in themselves, are often influenced by special interest groups operating at national or transnational levels.

It is at this point, and through the next post, I will move to the last piece of writing in this series to set out how I think it is possible to move towards provision developed and managed through participative institutions influencing local, national and transnational policy making. The other side of this coin will include my tentative suggestions for how we might identify and assess public value using both historical evidence and experience along with future facing collaborative activity in community settings; settings that exist both within and outside provider institutions.

Nigel

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;
4. That there is a need to examine the way in which public services operate to both meet the political and policy imperatives of incumbent governments at local and national levels and the resultant disempowerment of publics in the formulation and operation of policy;
5. We need to identify, in the context of education, how learners and the wider public can become the source of the criteria used to assess public value.  For me, this means that learners and others with a need to engage with institutions start to be seen as participants rather than passive recipients of service provision. So we need to envisage and develop models that move beyond those that are dependent on the existing processes that fail to promote active engagement in the formulation, evaluation and validation of public services;
6. For disadvantaged and marginalised groups who are the subjects of public services and rarely engaged with as citizens or publics, the formulations of public value I have discussed until now are unlikely to have any relevance as these same groups have little or no political influence or economic power.
7. Readers of previous posts will know how critical I have been of approaches to public value that encourage leaders of provider institutions to manipulate their “publics” perceptions to maximise the satisfaction ratings in the context of public audit activities such as inspection and, as a consequence, see public value as a managerial issue rather than one of participation and engagement.  Far too often, public value of services for the marginalised is seen as a cost offsetting exercise and this becomes the criterion that defines public value.

In what follows, I will explore each of these points in turn setting out what I see as alternatives in both the formulation of the term public value and how, from these alternatives, other ways of assessing public value and developing public policy can emerge.

Before I move on to the detailed discussion of these points I would like to follow Fine (2010) p126 by setting out what I think is wrong with some of the current uses of “public value”. I believe that “public value” needs to be reclaimed from those holding the positions I have criticised and reasserted afresh in terms of an agenda of public participation and engagement rather than the current agenda of economics, audit, managerialism and disembodied political and policy-making processes.

One way forward may be to develop “public value” as a pattern language in the context of the work of Schuler and his colleagues, which I’ll come to later.

Issues with “Public Value”

As I have tried to argue in the preceding work on public value;

1. The description and development of the concept is imprecise and contradictory in relation to definition, identification and the methods and theory used to develop measures and descriptions of the phenomenon;
2. It is used as a catch-all for generating responses to contradictory and fluctuating policy environments, particularly those promoted by the later years of Labour Government from 2005 to 2010 and, subsequently by the coalition government, in the UK and by changing national and state governance in the USA. (Other examples can be provided, but I see the USA and UK as most affected by these “fashionable” i.e. ephemeral and mutable uses of the term.)
3. The use of the term in the IFLL and related work seeks to narrow the meanings and the wider cultural, philosophical and political uses of the terms public and value and as a consequence, narrows the agenda of discourse around the public value of adult and community education. This is illustrated in the transition from the 2008 NIACE book to the limited discussions in the IFLL;
4. Its use in IFLL and its development by some of the authors reviewed is compromised by its accommodation to very limited managerialist and economistic approaches to considering different contexts and has nothing to say about issues that might affect publics such as economic advantage and disadvantage, political power in policy formation and development, gender, race, culture, class, globalisation and learning as opposed to training and skills acquisition;
5. Has no rigorous theory or research programme to establish the basis of the policy recommendations using the concept as a justification or rationale;
6. Has not produced a critical or reflexive literature to examine the claims made for the use made of the term “public value”;
7. It is used as a second order concept to support and endorse policy proposals and implementation that are dubious in terms of both their internal rationales and critical scrutiny;
8. The concept has been used to endorse a cursory scrutiny of public services based on their economic costs rather than any effects of their activities on publics;
9. It has been used, in the case of the IFLL materials, to legitimise an accommodation to policies that are inimical to existing theories and evidence drawn from adult education and learning. These approaches, described and explored in depth by Infed, show the efficacy of adult education for individuals, their families and communities in terms of activities and development rather than limited analyses of costs;
10. It turns away from confronting policy as contingent and open to critique and change, accepting both the policy and supporting analyses as unchangeable givens.

Public Value 2011

This set of analytical points has emerged from our developing analysis during 2010 as discussed on this blog. In 2011 we look to deepen and develop this work in terms of three concepts.

a) A description and rationale for networked Public Value,

b) A participatory model of public evaluation and assessment of public services,

c) A pattern language to simplify adoption of these ideas practically.

In the next post I will explore in detail the key issues outlined here and prepare the way for the proposals we have developed for discussion throughout 2011.

Nigel Ecclesfield

If you liked this post you might like CuriousCatherine’s blog post on Agile Policy; ‘The Plan is Not the Objective‘

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. You can pick up on the background to this discussion more fully if you wish from the three earlier posts on Not Just The Economy where I summarised and commented on all the papers in the NJE book.

The IFLL, along with much of the policy focused work, sees public value as an instrument of policy useful for assessing and legitimising management in public organisations and, in a number of cases, little more than just a means for establishing a pay policy for senior managers.  As noted in the page covering public value in Wikipedia, “Public value is the equivalent of shareholder value in public management.”  Following this logic, much writing on public value can be epitomised by the definition given in the paper produced by The Work Foundation in 2007 – “Simply expressed, public value is the analogue of the desire to maximise shareholder value in the private sector.  It is designed to get public managers thinking about what is most valuable in the service that they run and to consider how effective management can make the service the best that it can be. This approach presents a way of improving the quality of decision making, by calling for public managers to engage with services users and the wider public …” (Coats and Passmore 2007 p 4).

It is interesting to note that, after the UK Election in 2010, the Work Foundation saw no paradox in exploring the implications of reducing the differentials in the pay of public sector managers and workers to a ratio of 20:1; an expression of how far differentials have developed in the UK public sector. It is expressive of the instrumentalism governing these approaches to public value that no expression of the incongruity of the project has yet been expressed.  Equally, the analogy with shareholders implies that communities are aggregates of individuals who “invest” in their communities rather than having lived relations which are personal, cultural and historic and equally drawing comfort and support in those same settings.

Politics & the Managerial Approach

Expressed in this and similar ways by those proponents of a managerial approach to public value, what is immediately lost is any sense of the political issues involved and the hiding of control issues that are very pertinent here.  Indeed, it is striking that from Wikipedia through the work of Moore, to the Work Foundation definition just given, public value is never clearly defined, but described as the “analogue” or the “equivalent” of shareholder value. Its use by think tanks and policy makers has been focussed on public sector managers who, for the most part, demonstrate their engagement through the effective use of marketing tools such as surveys and opinion polls.  Good examples of this type of approach can be seen in both Carolyn Mager’s and John Stone’s papers in NJE e.g. Mager; “Public value thinking promotes an essentially proactive role for the public leader.  Leaders have a responsibility to educate and shape public opinion, understanding and awareness to maximise valuable outcomes.  The approach calls for significant political acumen, and could extend the legitimate space within which public sector managers can operate and promote innovation while managing risk.” (NJE p 127)

In other words, this role for public leaders sees them as, increasingly, the arbiters of value and publically desirable outcomes, operating as the front window for policies which were initiated centrally. With this strong leadership focus, it is not surprising that the real work of engagement, that is working with and being led by publics and communities, is finessed into “publicly-desirable” outcomes that reflect orthodoxies driven by Government rather than arrived at publically. The recent uncritical use of the term coined by David Cameron “The Big Society” demonstrates this trend, with managers of public services rushing to adopt the term, which underneath, appears to be driven by even further centralising of control of Government revenues e.g. the recent announcements of direct funding for schools, by-passing local politicians and community priorities beyond those of individual, competitively focused schools (the world of league tables!).

An ahistorical view of Public Value

It is not surprising that the views of public value derived from Moore appear to be ahistorical, they are similar to the literature on “social capital” where the terminology is used in ways that do not allow for complexity, or make use of understandings of political conflicts, as the perspective used is from a view that seems to regard management and leadership as immutable.  Mager, for instance, seems to see public value as a technical exercise for managers and does not hint at any analysis of the perspective of publics in her scenario i.e. learning with and from the public rather than just being concerned with shaping their views.

Similarly much work on the ‘student voice’ has focused on learner views and the gathering of data on those views without real engagement and I will return to this in the next post. In comparison, Howard’s paper in NJE sees adult education (as a public service) as needing to become inclusive, engaging and democratic and that learners should be participants in developing learning.  I will pursue this in greater detail in my next post.

The big issue with the application of public value from the point of view of UK Government and the think tanks is that there is an unresolved tension between Mager’s proactive managers who educate and shape public opinion and the managers under New Labour and the Coalition Government in the UK who are required to be reactive to policy and are excluded from the policy formation process except in the most peripheral manner.  Fred and I explored this paradox in some detail in our paper in the Greenwich University collection “Learning from learners’ experience” in 2009.

Towards an Active Definition of Public Value

Building on Howard’s ideas and drawing on the wonderful resources of Infed I will set out what I think might be an active definition of public value and how this might first be developed in the context of adult and community learning.  The basis for this are those elements of the dictionary definition of “public” – “of or belonging to the people; pertaining to a community or a nation; general; common to, shared in by, or open to, all; generally known; unconcealed, not private; engaged in, or concerning the affairs of the community; devoted or directed to the general good; international; open …..”  (Chambers Concise Dictionary 1998 p857) and “value” – “worth; a fair equivalent; intrinsic worth or goodness; …..” (ibid p1184). As a personal aside, it strikes me that the appropriation of terms such as public and value and their incorporation into the dialogue of public policy as organising principles negates the history and evolution of these terms in the spaces of political struggle and discourse and reduces them to “jargon”. As Adorno wrote about jargon in existentialism, “It is nothing new to find that the sublime becomes the cover for something low. “ (Adorno 1973 p xxi)  The next two postings will attempt to stay true to the definitions given above rather than substituting analogy and equivalence for a critical engagement with definitions and meaning.

Nigel

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

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

The term appears throughout the final report of the IFLL (there are sixteen instances of the use of the term) e.g.

Page 13 – “Education fosters social capital – the glue that binds societies together.”

Page 36 – “Three capitals: a framework for understanding” – “human capital, social capital and identity capital”

Page 36 – “Social capital refers to participation in networks where values are shared so that people contribute to common goals. The networks may be local (including family) or global. It is less of a personal attribute than human and identity capital. Social capital supports learning and is in turn strengthened by it. Although social capital is not acquired directly through education in the same way as skills and qualifications are, getting more education is a powerful way of increasing access to networks.”

Page 37 – “Without the formal and informal networks which make up social capital, people will find it hard to build up the skills and qualifications which make up human capital and apply them productively.”

Page 48 – The extended family’s internal social capital is important in the values it exhibits: the more of its members are involved in learning, the easier it is for others to be motivated also.”

Page 91 – “Peer group effects – their social capital – are very strong.”

Page 118 – “Those in the Third Age make a massive unpaid contribution to society. They volunteer in greater numbers than other age groups; they care for each other and for those older and younger than themselves … Arguably, they are the major source of social capital today.”

Page 195 – It is also about norms and values; learning helps people to be part of networks that sustain healthy lifestyles (social capital).”

Page 220 – “For specific recommendations we draw on the formulation by Tim Brighouse in his IFLL sector paper, that the local authority role should include the following:

• Define lifelong learning broadly and see it as a means of complementing economic regeneration with the creation of social capital;”

Page 222 – “Strengthen local employer networks; building social capital to grow human capital”

There are two other references, cited in case studies, but the quotations above provide the substantive development of the use of “social capital” in the final report.

One of the issues with the use of the ‘social capital; drawn from the wider literature by Fine, is that this is a remarkably plastic term and very difficult to pin down to a precise formulation. Even in the relatively favourable article in Wikipedia, the author(s) note, in the section on measurement that “There is no widely held consensus on how to measure social capital, which has become a debate in itself: why refer to this phenomenon as ‘capital’ if there is no true way to measure it? While one can usually intuitively sense the level/amount of social capital present in a given relationship (regardless of type or scale), quantitative measuring has proven somewhat complicated. This has resulted in different metrics for different functions. In measuring political social capital, it is common to take the sum of society’s membership of its groups. Groups with higher membership (such as political parties) contribute more to the amount of capital than groups with lower membership, although many groups with low membership (such as communities) still add up to be significant. While it may seem that this is limited by population, this need not be the case as people join multiple groups. In a study done by Yankee City,^[27] a community of 17,000 people was found to have over 22,000 different groups.” And later, quoting Bankston and Zhou “Sociologists Carl L. Bankston and Min Zhou have argued that one of the reasons social capital is so difficult to measure is that it is neither an individual-level nor a group-level phenomenon, but one that emerges across levels of analysis as individuals participate in groups. They argue that the metaphor of “capital” may be misleading because unlike financial capital, which is a resource held by an individual, the benefits of forms of social organization are not held by actors, but are results of the participation of actors in advantageously organized groups.”

This does not help the arguments put forward by the IFLL about the public value of adult learning and Fine’s arguments add further to the undermining of the concept as I will try to show in the following sections.

Fine opens the preface to his book with “To say that capital is social is not at all the same thing as saying that the social is capital (with due acknowledgement to the Mad Hatter and the March Hare)” p.viii.  As he notes further on “In the age of neo-liberalism, there has been a thrust to convert as much as possible to market forms in general and to the control of capital in particular. This has reinforced, rather than introduced, a tendency to treat all, and not just commercial, resources as if they were a form of capital.     ………… Everything from our abilities to our states of mind becomes capital-like. In this light it is hardly surprising that each and every social relation or interaction should become seen as a form of capital, something to be accumulated and to be deployed for advantage if not profit.  …. So if I were asked to give a definition of social capital, it would be any aspect of the social that cannot be deemed to be economic, but which can be deemed to be an asset p.ix.

Fine’s eleven arguments concerning Social Capital

Fine’s principal arguments are stated in the introduction to RBB and are summarised as eleven arguments;

1. Social capital ranges across all forms of human interaction and its applications have been “astonishingly diverse”;
2. Social capital as a term is parasitical on social theory and draws the critical component out of the concepts appropriated by those wedded to the term in their writings;
3. The term itself is an oxymoron, presuming that there can be a capital that is not social;
4. The economy and underlying economic theory are unexamined in the context of social capital;
5. The term offers a quick fix for economists to “explain” such things as differences in economic performance;
6. Social capital is used so frequently it has moved from being used as a residual explanatory factor to become seen as a leading explanatory factor (see the section in IFLL on “Three capitals: a framework for understanding);
7. The policy perspective induced by social capital offers the opportunity to improve the status quo without challenging it;
8. Social capital decontextualises analyses of social situations and loses other components such as class and community resulting in a very fluid set of concepts employed in the literature;
9. Social capital has been both a symptom of and exacerbates the problems identified in the integrity and funding of research in recent years;
10. The literature on social capital has not addressed key criticisms of the term itself or its use in research;
11. As a result of the above, the term has become definitionally chaotic.  see pp2-5

What does this do in the context of the final report of the IFLL (Title “Learning through Life”)? One key argument I would make here is that, wedded to a perspective that sees “social capital” as a key term in the analysis, the authors have drawn the critical component out of the term “public value” and this has led to a very limited presentation of the possibility for the more critical view of public value that emerged in a number of the contributions to “Not Just the Economy: the public value of adult learning” (NJE). Indeed in the topic papers already discussed, and in the  final report, there is a preponderance of a perspective that is purely economic in both focus and analysis and largely uncritical of the status quo and the assumptions of policy e.g. Leitch recommendations and subsequent Government policy, whether New Labour or of the current Government as they follow Leitch.

Social Capital; Community or Citizen focus?

As can be seen from the quotations from the final report, the use of the term “social capital” is inconsistent and I am struck by the way in which, in a report that contains 107 references to “community” and 16 to “public value” they are never used in the same sentences or context as “social capital” and other terms such as “peer group” and networks are substituted in these discussions in a way that turns the focus on individual activity in its aggregated forms and away from what is social and difficult to disaggregate in community or political settings. Of the 22 references to “political” in the document only one (on p. 178) makes reference to political engagement and civic activity and, as is characteristic of this report, talks of strengthening local employer networks (p.222), but not of strengthening communities or associations such as trade unions.

I’ve noted before that there is a link between globalisation, climate change and the skills agenda that is not addressed by Leitch or Stern and the same narrowness is apparent in the final report which has one reference to the globalised economy and two sections indexed on climate change where the issue is treated as one of being a matter of understanding with no reference to learning for action. The closest we get is “Finally, perhaps the biggest challenge facing citizens (not communities or societies? – my emphasis and question) of any nation is that of climate change. The looming scale of this demands that civic capability is developed within a systems framework that connects local participation with global responsibility” (p.181). A position that is a long way from Richard Bolsin’s paper (NJE) and focused on Government rather than community action and learning. Throughout the report potentially critical issues are dealt with in an abstract manner and key issues are segregated by the use of the “three capitals” model as a basis for analysis rather than a more synthetic view of the issues being taken.

The purpose of this post has been to introduce the analysis developed by Fine in relation to “social capital” and set out why I think the IFLL has been compromised by its use of this term as a key part of their analysis. I will return to this problem in my final post of this, increasingly lengthy, series as Fine offers a useful point of reference and support for a number of the points I wish to make when setting out our alternative concept of public value.

I will end by pointing to a similar reliance on the term “social capital” in the Spirit Level. In the context of the recent critique of the statistical analysis of this work, which has been responded to by the authors, it is a shame that “as epidemiologists” to quote Richard Wilkinson, one of the authors, they had not looked to Fine’s work before they placed so much emphasis on their use of the term. The same could be said of Schuller and Watson for the IFLL and this once again supports Fine’s argument about how the barriers between disciplines  seem to impoverish scholarship.

posted by Nigel Ecclesfield