30/05/2009 by lizit.

I’ve begun to read some of the informal learning texts and I’m finding them fascinating - there is so much that is familiar as well as seeing connections I hadn’t been aware of before.  I’ve just read McGivney, V. (1999). Informal learning in the community: a trigger for change and development. Leicester: NIACE and the whole debate about what is informal learning is there, together with changing perceptions of community, stuff about learning in community groups, etc.  It has triggered reminders of the different sponsorship of different community/voluntary initiatives - education/social services/home office/etc and the different training and career paths of professionals in those areas - although doing similar things very often projects existed in parallel with little communication between departments. Looking at McGivney’s references to numbers of community groups and involvement in them has taken me back to my MSc work and the figures there - and references to other community studies.

It has been interesting too to read of the changing views of the use of the word ‘community’ because of its usage to mean various different things in different contexts - at least 4 different categories of community are identified. That is one of things that makes community fascinating for me, but there is almost a criticism that because some forms of community have no geographical basis, that makes them problematic.

It is also interesting looking at the whole area of pathways into learning.  I am reading about what SLN was about and I didn’t realise it at the time.  The whole widening participation agenda is laid out fairly clearly and questions raised about whether accreditation of learning is always a good thing. There seems to be a tension between learning for its own sake and learning in order to progress - discussion too about progression routes.

It is interesting to note the plethora of NIACE publications at the end of the 1990s before the strong emphasis on work based learning and progression into HE.  Thinking back to what was happening in adult education then, apart from continuing financial pressure and raising the numbers for viability of classes, it was the time when leisure classes where being challenged to have clear learning objectives and progression pathways leading to many classes ceasing or moving out of the formal education arena (I know this happened with lacemaking, but that was no doubt not the only casualty).

It’s quite reassuring to find books saying what I was thinking/feeling which suggests my ideas about informal learning are not completely off the wall.  I still have to get back into the community literature - will be interesting to travel back in time but also to look at community and virtual environments. I’m actually getting quite excited at the moment - how long will this last!?

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24/05/2009 by lizit.

Things can change as I get more into the literature, but the plan for my DPhil at the moment is to do something about informal learning in communities within a virtual world context.

The next task is to put together a proper literature review.  This will be accompanied by making a plan for the next 12 months including what I am actually doing as opposed to just defining areas of interest and reading a lot of stuff.

The areas to be addressed in the literature review will be:

• What makes a community - what is meant by the term community?
  • community development models and literature (looking at the literature from the 60’s and 70’s and possibly earlier as well as more recent stuff)
  • online communities, both 2D and 3D and the sense of place and presence found in these communities - are online communities really communities (thinking of argument we had in my OU tutor group).
  • communities of interest - people bound together out of common interests/hobbies/challenges/disabilities/etc rather than people who live in proximity to each other
  • learning communities - both Wenger’s communities of practice and the community of inquiry model from Athabasca
• What is informal learning? (Might be useful to also look for a working definition of learning per se)
  • Recent government white paper and the preceding consultation process
  • Various older NIACE documents, including the McGivney stuff if I can get hold of it
  • Colley’s work on formality and informality as aspects of all learning
  • Peer group learning
  • possibly child development in some way - could tie into Self Determination Theory and intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (which I was thinking about in the Ecolab presentation around competence and achievement focus/drivers)
• What constitutes a virtual world?
  • should be possible to draw on work I’ve done for DELVE and other things I’ve been reading, including the various ethnographic studies in Second Life
  • To include or not to include 2D virtual worlds (interesting thoughts around SLED as a community of peer group learners)

I do need to give some thought to why this matters rather than just being something that interests me.  Initial thoughts include:

• The diatribes on virtual worlds and social networking from Susan Greenfield - are kids brains being fried and kids being turned into anti-social zombies or are they participating in learning experiences.  If the latter, what?
• Government white paper talks about informal learning, but context seems to be as pathway to formal learning or to employment or both, with no real value on informal learning for its own sake.
• There is a lot of formal learning in 3D worlds, but there seems to be an element of informal learning underpinning this some of the time, SLED for example.  that informal learning may be in a variety of places.  If the forms informal learning takes can be identified, it might be possible to use it more formally in scaffolding learning experiences. (This sounds a bit counter to what I think I am interested in if I am saying informal learning should be valued for itself.)
• Informal learning seems to have links to Self Determination theory - competence, autonomy - and community is to do with relatedness. Would be neat to be able to tie this together and say something about the importance of intrinsic motivation.

In the meantime, a couple of possible representations of what I want to look at.  I suspect the second is nearer the mark, but another area for more work.

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23/05/2009 by lizit.

I’m feeling a great deal happier about the DPhil than I have for weeks. I think there are two things contributing to that, one less expected than the other.

Driving into Sussex yesterday, it struck me that one of the positives out of the annual review meeting was something more than feeling affirmed; it was actually that I had a sense that I had as much right as anybody else to be a DPhil student.  In fact more than that, a recognition that I have always felt a bit of a fraud academically - sort of gate crashing a gathering full of clever people.  Although I haven’t suddenly started thinking of myself as clever, I do realise I am probably (note the slight caution there) as capable as anybody else who is on that path of working towards and completing a DPhil. No doubt there will be times ahead when I feel an even bigger academic imposter, but for the moment I’m staying with the positives!

The second thing is a sense that I have now got some ideas about what my DPhil will be about.  Although I know not many people read this blog, I don’t feel quite ready to formulate those ideas apart from for myself at the moment but I do have a much more distinct sense of where I am going and I am feeling quite excited and interested in the ideas I am playing with. I think it is also very clear to me that it is highly unlikely I would have arrived where I am at this moment if I hadn’t been on the circuitous journeys of the past months.

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19/05/2009 by lizit.

I really didn’t know what was going to happen yesterday at my annual review.  it was all very well my supervisor telling me it would be OK, but I had paperwork that seemed to be making value judgments, and although the words pass/fail were not used, perhaps inevitably I felt there was some kind of hurdle to jump and feared that I would be found seriously wanting.

In reality, I found the meeting very positive, helpful and affirming.  OK, I came out of it aware that I have a whole heap of work to do, but it is work that I have plenty of time to do, and some of it is much more potentially onerous than other bits.  Some of it is around being clear why I am not looking at some things and some of it is stuff I do need to look at and understand. I am in awe of the breadth of knowledge of some people - how do some folk know so much, even to the level of being able to point at possible things to read! I also see the need for clarity of definition - what is a community? How does one differentiate different types of community?  How does Twitter, for example, compare with a text-based forum, or a 3-D virtual world, or a group of people who meet face to face, or a neighbourhood? What are the characteristics of community?  Are some communities in some way richer than others?

What is it that I am doing at the end of the day?  That is still a bit of a fog - and it was acknowledged that it is OK to be in a fog and that is part of the DPhil experience - but what was clear to me is that what I am saying probably has something to do with policy.  That perhaps isn’t that surprising given my background in voluntary organisation management and in community development, but no bad thing to acknowledge it and recognise that is OK.  I guess it also affirms one of the other things that has appeared in my diagrams which has been around change and being agents of change. This is as much about who I am as about what I know and what I understand.

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17/05/2009 by lizit.

OK - I don’t know what people will make of my ideas at my thesis committee tomorrow, but I feel a whole lot clearer and more focused.  The last two postings have been helpful in clarifying some of my own thinking, identifying stuff I know something about and, more importantly, identifying some of the key thoughts that have meaning for me.

My focus hasn’t moved from virtual worlds, but rather than seeing them as the main focus and how their affordances can be used, I am shifting to seeing them as an environment in which people do things.  I have also realised that a primary interest of mine - and I have said it before is ‘ownership’.  By ownership, I am talking about whether we own our own learning and relational experiences or whether we are engaged in activities which are owned by somebody else.  For instance, the model of education I was brought up with in the 50s and 60s was essentially one of learning a lot of facts and then regurgitating them in an exam and being marked on how well I remembered those facts.  There was no real encouragement or enabling to engage with what I was learning in contrast to the more prevalent learning philosophy today where the emphasis is on constructing our own understanding based on a mix of previous experience, information and experimentation leading to an ownership of knowledge.

My main problem with social work was that there was too much emphasis on doing things for people - or pressuring them to do things in a way which met the approval of the professionals, rather than in enabling people to own their own problems and be actively involved in finding solutions.  Today, many older people or people with disabilities are given a budget and are able to determine their own care priorities (the direct payments scheme).  When we started having interdisciplinary meetings with ‘clients’ in the 1980s and letting them know in terms of hours what support they could have each week and asking how they wanted that support divvying up it was almost revolutionary. Yet it was only recognising we were dealing with adults with a right to own their own care agenda rather than having solutions imposed on them by professionals.

Self-determination theory suggests that people are intrinsically motivated from birth to learn and to respond to challenges, or set themselves challenges.  It also recognises that extrinsic rewards can lead to a decrease in intrinsic motivation. The education system has become very extrinsically focused over the past couple of decades - standards pre-date New Labour even though New Labour has gone in for target setting with a vengeance. During the same period there has been a steady decline in adult education - all recent surveys by NIACE suggest fewer and fewer adults who are not actually in education undertake any educational activity.  This may be reflective of the decrease in adult education leisure classes - many classes have ceased because they lead to no recognisable qualification - but it may also be how those being questioned understand learning and education. The more education is certificated in one way or another, the less aware we are of the learning we engage in daily in our interactions with others in the communities where we live and work.

Two things that struck me when I first started looking at Second Life were the amount of learning that was going on and the existence of a gift economy.  Learning was sometimes semi-formal - attending building classes given by other residents - but it was also informal - asking questions in a sandbox or just when trying to move around.  It was the same learning we do when we live, however briefly, in a different country or even a different place in our own country. The gift economy represents the way information was freely given with no expectation of reward.  Not only was information imparted, but gifts of various sorts.  When I set up an area for the Sussex Learning Network, I was able to rent a large sky platform and have it fully equipped with all manner of things for a relatively small sum of money which in no way covered the time that had been given to build the facility.

Although Second Life has been colonised by educators and there is much formal education taking place there, there is a continuing community of people who use/live in Second Life and undertake a range of activities there.  I am interested in exploring what can be learned about informal, intrinsically motivated learning in this setting. I suspect that community development theories will help in understanding what is happening.  It is likely there are similar behaviour patterns in other virtual environments, including child facing ones.  What can we learn from these settings about what motivates people to learn?  What can virtual worlds teach the physical world about re-enabling basic values of wanting to learn and be challenged.

That last bit sounds a bit woolly and pompous - need to work on it.  But basically, I am interested in informal learning, intrinsic motivation, ownership and community and the virtual world offers a place to look at this and relate stuff to the physical world.

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09/05/2009 by lizit.

I’ve got just over a week now to get this report written and if anything I am getting more, rather than less, confused about what I am doing, or trying to do.  Try as I might to focus in, I am finding myself focusing out and looking at big pictures rather than little details - maybe the result of too many OU systems thinking courses.

I am hoping that putting down some of my thinking may help me to make some sense out of the muddle and to come up with something credible to discuss with my thesis committee.  Guess my main concern is not to look too foolish!

My starting point about this time last year was whether Second Life was providing any added value to learners in formal learning situations.  I had read Maggi Savin-Baden’s paper which had addressed troublesome learning and was struck by the language being used being reminiscent of the language used in counselling and therapy - the suggestion that working through a learning disjunction leading to a complete change of thought patterns (maybe I exaggerate!)

During the past months, I have done a lot of learning and thinking and become aware of lots of different ideas which can contribute to thinking about virtual worlds and education. I have also found myself re-visiting my own personal history and ideology and looking at how my own thinking has developed against a background of big ideas and socio-economic-political change over the past half century. In looking at academic papers in particular, I am increasingly aware of the narrowing of focus of so much I read which makes little attempt to engage in joined up thinking across disciplines or ideologies. At times it feels as though wheels are constantly being re-invented or origins of ideas are being ignored as knowledge is developed incrementally rather than holistically.

At the same time, in my own thinking, I am finding I am looking more at big ideas, influences and trends.  For example, when I began work in community development in the early 70’s, there was a strong awareness of the roots of community development being in the philanthropic movements of the 19th century, the university settlements of the inter-war period and post-war socialism, all tinged with the emerging rights movements (at that time women and black, but later others), and counteracting the individuality of the 60’s.  Though there was a recognition of links between community development in the UK and community action in the States, there was little attempt to look for common methodology with community development elsewhere (I can’t even remember what the terms used to describe the third world or developing nations was back then).

Community development in the UK effectively disappeared in the early 80’s - no funding - and the volunteer movement had to re-assess itself because of changes in political ideology.  It is possible to trace the language used by Margaret Thatcher in various key speeches through that period which signalled a change from community being important to the rise and fall of voluntarism to emphasis being placed on the individual with the famous words ‘there is no such thing as society’. Behind these changes seemed to be a growing awareness than community development, voluntary organisations and even volunteers cost money.  By the end of the 1980’s the notion of voluntary organisations being contracted to undertake specific tasks by public bodies was firmly rooted and much social care is provided today on this type of contractual basis.  At the same time, the lottery was born and grant giving to charitable bodies gave a new lease of life to more innovative organisations.

Other major changes during the past 4o years have been in communications and globalisation - each feeding the other.  We have become familiar with seeing news as it happens.  Film of famine in Africa no longer has quite the shocking quality it had when we saw the first pictures of the Ethiopian droughts, but perhaps we are still shocked by the effects of natural disasters in New Orleans or Italy - at least briefly. In recent months we are being reminded again of community, this time in the form of the global village as we are told that it is only through collaboration and working together that the credit crunch can be overcome.  Again in recent days, the risk of global pandemic has raised its head, and with it a realisation of what a small place the world is now that so many people are involved in travel to so many different places.

Returning to virtual worlds, my starting point was very simplistic - what does Second Life offer to education by way of added value.  Over the past months, I have become much more aware of the existence of other virtual worlds and have visited some, albeit briefly.  More importantly, I have realised that any thinking about Second Life has to recognise previous thinking about virtual worlds  - and the scope gets quite scary.  At the very least this needs to acknowledge Usenet and bulletin boards, the 2-D web, gaming, virtual reality and social networking.  In considering education and virtuality, there is a need also to be aware of changing trends in elearning and open access learning materials such as the MIT and OU repositories. Second Life was not developed as a learning environment, although parts of it have been colonised by educational institutions. There is a lot of informal learning happening in Second Life, just as there is throughout Web 2.0, and much of this reflects community initiatives of one sort and another.

My journeying over the past months has also led me into an awareness of some motivational theories, principally Flow and Self-determination theory.  SDT is of particular interest with its emphasis on autonomy and relatedness (both important themes to any community development professional).

Looking even more specifically at Second Life, apart from reading a lot of stuff about things going on in the virtual world and attending several workshops and conferences with a virtual world focus, I have been involved informal educational experiences with both OU and Sussex students. There is no doubt that the virtual world does offer an opportunity to develop learning experiences using the specific affordances of the virtual world, but I am beginning to question whether this is actually what I am interested in. However, I am still interested in Second Life as a learning environment and I am finding myself thinking again about some of the tenets of community development and self help and how they apply within the virtual world.  Linked to this is the recent government white paper with its emphasis on informal learning.

This blog is getting even more disjointed now!

Informal learning has always interested me as so much of what happens in community is experiential, informal learning involving a transfer of skills and knowledge. It fits in with various personal growth philosophies. Self-help fed the development of the WEA.  Early years education in the UK has formalised the work initiated by parents in the development of pre-school playgroups. Although APL and APEL have been around for some years, there is very little accreditation of informal learning - it is so varied, it is difficult to see how this can happen and even if it is a good thing.  Does formally recognising the informal change or restructure it?  Some would say the early years curriculum with it’s emphasis on assessment runs totally counter to the objectives of playgroups.

So where is this leading?  I am interested in the potential of Second Life as a learning community and I am interested in informal learning.  I am also interested in how people own their own learning and how they support each other through self-help and exchange of skills.  I am interested in what makes people want to learn when there is no formal recognition or validation of that learning.  I am interested in drawing connections between the developing community in Second Life and the trends which are observable in the bigger world picture. I am interested in joined up thinking rather than disconnected nuggets.

Now how do I turn any of this into anything that will make sense for my DPhil annual review meeting?!

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