SocialLearn

Climate change is a reality. It is affecting the lives of billions of people and the Earth’s ecosystems now. Everywhere, people are saying – act.

We know we can take action as individuals through the day to day choices we make in our homes, at the supermarket and in the office. But we also need to take bigger action and we need to do that together.

Climate change presents two major challenges: to rapidly reduce emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases and to adapt to the changes which are already happening due to past emissions.

The complexity of what we are now facing in a rapidly climate changing world means that no one individual, group or organization has all the necessary skills or knowledge either to fully understand the challenges involved or to design the appropriate solutions.

We need to collaborate. Such collaboration will need to involve all sectors of society, including citizens, businesses and government, and to link initiatives from the local to the global level.

The Open University believes learning processes and the web can empower people to collaborate and find innovative solutions to the realities of climate change. This is what we are now working on through two programmes; ‘Learning to Live with Climate Change and SocialLearn.

The web is brilliant at bringing information and ideas to thousands of people – as it is here, right now. It is a vast social network which connects people with each other and people with ideas. Conversations start. New ideas spread.

The next step is to learn, make choices and to act together.

Everywhere, people will be saying – let’s learn, let’s collaborate, let’s act together.

[written for  Blog Action Day. The subject is climate change.]

‘A quarter unable to read properly’, ‘150,000 children unable to read and write at 11′ – these were some of this year’s education headlines in the UK. These were simplified summaries – these school children are not necessarily unable to read; they are ‘functionally illiterate’. In other words, they can read, but they are not judged to do so well enough to deal with the everyday requirements of life.

My children bring comprehension passages home from school: extracts from tv guides, bus timetables and the like. And, yes, like many adults, they find it difficult to make sense of these. But these aren’t part of their world. They can text for bus information, and find anything they want to watch on BBC iplayer or YouTube.

Why not test yourself on their terms? Here’s an extract from the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card game official rulebook:

“Continuous Effect
“You use this type of effect just by declaring its activation during
your Main Phase. (See Turn Structure, page 26) There are some
Ignition Effects that have a cost to activate, like discarding
cards from your hand, Tributing a monster, or paying Life
Points. Because you can choose when to activate this type of
effect, it’s easy to create combos with them.”

Did you understand that? Now that you have read it: could you use continuous effect within a game? What would be the advantages of using it? Could you explain why anyone would tribute a monster, given that there is a cost to this? Or do you find that you are functionally illiterate when you try to operate in a ten-year-old’s world?

At this year’s Handheld Learning conference, John Paul Gee argued that children in the UK and the US who have been graded functionally illiterate can and do read high-level texts comparable to those read by doctoral students. They can do this if they are passionate about the subject – and if the reading relates to their experience. Give a child a manual in isolation and they will ignore it. Give a child a set of Yu-gi-oh! cards and they’ll play the game. Later they may choose to find the manual and make sense of it. No one fails Yu-gi-oh!

And the relevance for social learn? This is how social learning can – and should – be. It starts with, and is driven by, a passion, an interest, an experience. It is informed and guided by others, it takes place in a social setting, and it is a process of growth and development – not a scramble away from failure.

(This is Martin Weller – I’m going to be taking over some of the blogging role from Laura as she has moved to a new position of Global Ruler of Supreme Power).

So I finally got my Google Wave invite and enthusiastically went in to play. The aim of Wave is to provide a collaboration environment. Users create ‘waves’, which you add other users to. You can edit posts and there is a neat ‘playback’ function so you can see how a wave has unfolded over time. You can of course add all sorts of cool widgets, such as maps, to messages and edit other people’s so what you have is a sequence of collaboration unfolding over time.

But the overwhelming feeling I had, and most of those I waved with, (may as well get used to that as a new verb) was a sense of ‘now what?’. This is partly because the interface is, surprisingly for Google, unintuitive – for instance, to edit a message you need to click on the little arrow in the top corner of a message. But I think it is largely because Wave is a solution to a problem we’re not sure we have yet. It is a tentative technology. Despite all the hype, I’m not sure Google even know how people will use it. It’s a ‘put it out there and see what happens’ approach. It’s not that Wave is a disappointment or failure, it’s more that it will require time to grow. I expect someone will suggest we try brainstorming a research bid in Wave, or conducting a global debate, and we’ll find that it really is a useful tool.

This raises a couple of issues in relation to SocialLearn for me: firstly it demonstrates that if you have clout and presence like Google you can afford to launch something that takes time to establish itself. Had Wave been launched by a small start-up we wouldn’t have been clammering for invites and the time it will take to establish itself may not have been granted. The same might well be true for SocialLearn, and indeed any learning focused applications. They are not like Flickr where it is an easy, and obvious, sell. They take time and people to demonstrate their advantage – to illustrate they are a solution to a problem you didn’t know you had.

The second point is that tools like Wave begin to look awfully close to VLEs, and HEIs simply cannot compete with this level of technological innovation. It is pointless to try and create a Wave like tool for learning – Wave is that tool. So educational technologists and HEIs need to concentrate on what they are best at – applying such tools in an educational context. This, I think, strengthens the hand of the loosely-coupled approach where different tools are knitted together to create a learning environment, rather than one centralised system.

‘Passion is important. How do we tap into that passion that learners have? How do we change the curriculum and learning?’ James Clay asked this while listening to James Paul Gee  at Handheld Learning 2009 .

JPG argues that we face a paradox – our schools don’t make use of the best principles about language and learning – but our popular culture does. He finds people learning together online in ‘affinity groups’. They come together in these groups because they share a passionate interest and because they are willing and happy to spend days, months, even years, exploring that passion. It might be Pokémon, it might be military history, it might be developing open source software or it might be an interest in environmental issues. People learn and work together because of their shared passion.

Affinity groups are not divided by age and they are not divided by expertise. Novices and experts interact and build knowledge together. There is no end to the learning, everyone can engage and everyone can learn from and with each other. JPG identifies ten characteristics of such groups:

1. Organised around a passion.
2. Produce – don’t just consume.
3. Smart tools.
4. Not age graded.
5. Newbies and experts together
6. People mentor and are mentored
7. Knowledge is distributed.
8. Knowledge is dispersed.
9. Learning is proactive but aided.
10. Everyone is always still a learner.

How many of these characteristics do we associate with schools and colleges today? How many can we associate with social learning?

The ALT-C conference in Manchester was the venue for Martin Bean to announce the forthcoming launch of SocialLearn. It was also an example of how social learning can work in practice. The conference functioned as a catalyst for online social learning, with delegates linking up using a multitude of different websites, tools and blogs – including ALT-C’s own Crowdvine site. The conference prompted people to create, link to and access resources, to ask questions, make recommendations, engage in debate and reflect on discussion. Of course, other conferences do all these things – but here many of the resources were not prepared beforehand, they were put together on the fly, and the debate extended both before and after the conference, reaching and involving people worldwide who were unable to attend in person.

And the downsides? This social learning did not persist in one place – it flared up around ALT-C and then died down again – participants needed to have plenty of online connections in place in order to locate and engage in subsequent interaction as other events provided new catalysts for interaction. And, when the conference was on and interest was at its height, the deluge of associated trivia became overwhelming as spammers took note that there could be money to be made from a bunch of interested and engaged people gathering and interacting in the same online environments.

And where did the social learning continue? Thanks to Colin Warren for this list of hashtags: #mquncon09 #aisitic09 #qsite09 #eTLC09 #hhl09 and #ulearn09