Posted via web from George’s posterous

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

e-framework.org

The eFramework people have published their technical model here: http://www.e-framework.org/Resources/TechnicalModel/tabid/1008/Default.aspx The model depends on continuing feedback from the community. Their aim is to develop “… a common approach to the description of service-oriented design and analysis,” and provide “… a neutral means to articulate the design of software services” in order “…to assist international education and research agencies and communities in planning, prioritising and implementing IT infrastructure more effectively.”

This is a good aim. So, the question is, does it? They want the framework to assist in strategic planning, but it is hard to see how to make the step from the more or less technical abstract layers up to the policy implementation layers. There is still an exclusive, jesuitical (exegetical, hermeneutic) gap, largely inaccessible to lay people, that needs to be interpreted. You have to learn the language.

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It has been a fraught three days working on the new JISC-ssbr platform. After a long time of indecision we are pushed to cement something in place and live with it. I am writing this as much to check that feeds into the various blog components work.

Another very useful Berkman talk on Immersive Interfaces by Chris Dede, Timothy E Wirth professor of Learning Technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  Dede develops a typology of immersive interfaces and illustrates their application in US middle schools. Even more usefully he presents a simple analytical framework for discussing immersive environments for learning: is it an environment or is it an interface? And, as frosting on the cake he gives sound cultural and pedagogical arguments for the use of immersive technologies in education.

Milestones and all that: JISC programme managers, today, agreed the Institutional Innovation Programme, Support, Synthesis and Benefits Realisation Project plan. Hurrah!

Thanks and a(nother) tippo to A J Cann for the link (via his soti bookmarks on delicious) to D’arcy Norman’s epigenetics and the institution. This hit me as an approach to conceptualising the relationship between individuals and institutions for a paper I am puzzling over writing, about the utility of participatory media (Web2.0/the social internet) to the support, synthesis and benefits realisation of educational R&D programmes.

The term PLE is going to come into its own in 2009, because of the prominence of the digital literacy/academic literacy and lifelong learning debates. There has been much discussion of PLEs over the past four or five years (yes, that long). I was led to this reflection by Graham Attwell’s post, How my Personal Learning Environment is Changing.

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