Further to the last post, Sustaining Communities, the tension in higher education is between: open educational dialogue and institutional pragmatics.

Open educational dialogue is concerned with networks or communities for information sharing, which take a user-centred approach to learning and design for learning on all scales. These networks make use of user-generated content for learning resources, including novel audio & video resources. Assessment, feedback and feed forward is conceived dialogically for learning. Among the benefits of open educational dialogue should be improved student induction and retention in situated learning communities. Among the technical enabling practices by which open educational dialogue might be supported, projects are working on systems mapping, business analysis (BA) and work flows. Information aggregation practice and content syndication (RSS) are being implemented using increasingly open web services and service oriented architectures (SOA). While institutions are traditionally seen as being located in physical space, mobility and location-based services are increasingly re-articulating the relationships between people, space and institutions: domestic, commercial, cultural, civic, language, faith, education, state and their various concrete reflections in houses, offices, systems, stores, transport ways, networks, authorities, maps, corridors and campuses.

Innovation themes supporting open education dialogue appear to be:

• Portals and personal portals (programmes, eportfolios and PLEs) to CPD aligned with
• Flexible frameworks for accreditation, underpinned by
• Multimedia epistemologies, the semantic web and a peer-to-peer participatory culture in disciplines

Sustaining participation as principal, agent, volunteer, affiliate, staff for:

• natural and built environments
• food, water, energy
• economies
• polities and communities

Managing participatory identity

• learning (peripheral participation)
• authentication
• trust (accreditation)
• access (privileges)
• openness

The innovative potential of these themes depends on and is set against an enabling apparatus of social institutions – institutional pragmatics. These are the means by which order is brought to, or structures educational practice along rational lines. Institutional pragmatics may be resolved to nine categories:

1. Learning teaching and assessment
2. Research and development
3. Business and community engagement
4. Learning resources
5. eAdmin
6. Institutional ICT services
7. Physical estates and learning spaces
8. Mobile, location aware and pervasive computing
9. Green ICT

That is the ‘unofficial’ stuff. Now on to the official things – papers, symposia and the like. I have tried to develop a series of linked papers / contributions for these events (I am not sure whether it will work) around the themes of Web 2.0, digital identities and Personal Learning Environments.  For the first of the events, Alt C, I am making a presentation as part of the project team from the now finished Jisc Emerge support project.

via pontydysgu.org

And. much as ever, comments on the past are comments on the present. I am interested to see how this symposium evolves and whether any movements might be detected; what might they be? I think the new themes are

• something around new multimedia epistemologies and their impact on the privileged academic literacies of text
• something around portals and personal portals (portfolios and PLEs) for CPD: highly reconfigurable views onto complex networks of collaboration and accreditation: regional, trans-regional, national, trans-national, which might disrupt traditional institutional identities, linked to
• Flexible frameworks for accreditation.

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There is a tradition of keeping “work blogs”. Scott Wilson’s workblog is a touchstone for this kind of online identity and presence. Scott writes a lot on identity and presence and education (and here and here). This is written in my workblog. I feed stuff into here from my Posterous account. I use Posterous to feed my other work Blog, Developing Themes for the JISC Institutional Innovation Programme support, synthesis and benefits realisation project.

If any new Lecturer at Brookes wants a work blog on our WordPress MU development platform or a wiki space on our in-house Confluence server. Just give me a shout.

groberts@brookes.ac.uk

…according to:
Franda, Marcus (2001), Governing the Internet: the emergence of an international regime. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, CO, USA p 206

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I used to be concerned in this direction when making a transition from working in industrial training and development education to working in educational development roles in higher education.

All categorisations of this sort serve to channel people and institutions into differently funded and privileged regimes. There are no essentials of this sort. Conceptual categories are constructed. These constructions do have agentive force in networks of inference or meaning (epistemologies, actor networks, discourses). They may be useful tools of development. They may also be part of a colonial apparatus of social control.

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Or, at least that is one possible reading of this following example from HESA’s Guidelines for the use of the DLHE Longitudinal Survey Dataset.

To illustrate how this is done:Black, mixed and other ethnic group graduates accounted for 21.9% of the selected Sample A.

From the initial census it is known that these graduates represent just 4.9% of all graduates

To ensure that these graduates feature in the analysis in their correct proportion, the ‘black’, ‘mixed ethnic group’ and ‘other ethnicity’ graduates in the sample would be given a weight of 4.9/21.9.

You mean weight the results by 5/20 because most of the respondents were black! What is the correct proportion? This is a small example of how marginalised groups appear to have to work five times as hard just to be level.

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via ouseful.wordpress.com

This was written about visualising the opened09 Open Education conference. But it is more widely useful as an exploration of the affordances of visualisation generally as an aid to understanding. In the Institutional innovation programme I am trying to understand the basic questions underlying visualisation of the programme: people, projects, technologies, themes and how they link. Even before you ask the question, “what does it mean” you have to ask more fundamental questions. In observing that Twitter networks were interesting Tony Hirst first did a manual filter of frequency of posts over time. What are the first questions that give shape to the Institutional Innovation visualisation?

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