10/02/2010 by lizit.

I had a lengthy conversation yesterday with Amy Scatliff. We had been put in touch by another colleague who had met Amy at a conference last autumn. Amy and I are both interested in learning in other than classroom situations, which means we have a lot of common territory though arriving there via different routes.

During our discussion, we found ourselves discussing the way different types of learning are valued. Although the distinction in the value afforded to formal and informal learning can be traced back to the Greek philosophers (Hager, 1998) who regarded theoretical knowledge as having greater meaning and importance than knowledge derived from doing or creating, we did wonder if the non-accredited, and often unrecognised, learning of adults in the community has diminished in status in recent decades.  The emphasis on accredited qualifications is probably greater now than ever before the expectation that  pre-defined achievement levels will be met from early years education and throughout schooling and on into further and higher education. Amy commented on the way people often devalue their skills and are sometimes surprised - and even shocked - to find they have skills which others value and want to learn.

We also commented on the changing nature of society and societal values in both the US and UK over the past 30 years, with an increasing emphasis on financial rewards and the changing role of women in the economy. There is a sense that the type of skill sharing around a family gathering described by Foley (1999) is less likely now than in the past, but that one of the positive effects of the credit crunch might be a recognition of the need to reacquire some basic skills. We laughed about the current series on UK TV where people are being encouraged to share their grandmothers’ recipes and wondered whether this might signal the beginning of a change in the way different types of knowledge and skills are valued.

Reflecting on our conversation - and we covered much more territory than that outlined here - I am reminded of the law of unintended consequences: so often when we make a change (or when change occurs) although some problems may be alleviated or there may be positive growth in some ways, there is all too often a flip side which has not been anticipated. Sometimes it may be the silver lining of the dark cloud, but all too often the unintended consequences are negative rather than positive.

Foley, G. (1999). Learning in social action: A contribution to understanding informal education. London: Zed Books Ltd.
Hager, P. (1998). Recognition of Informal Learning: Challenges and Issues. Journal of Vocational Education and Training: The Vocational Aspect of Education, 50(4), 521-535.

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25/01/2010 by lizit.

Thought it was about time I posted a catch up on what I am actually doing!

The focus of my DPhil is now the learning journeys of the various participants involved in the support and care of children and young people on the autistic spectrum. There are many different people involved from parents and carers to support staff in schools and residential establishments to education, health and social service professionals - and probably a few others as well. Although there is a notion of partnership in the provision of care and support, this partnership can be uneven because of the different levels and types of expertise different partners bring to the table, the way this expertise is or is not valued by other partners and the relative power of the different partners in providing access to resources.

I am planning to focus specifically on learning - which in practice means how people develop knowledge and expertise about autistic spectrum conditions/disorders (the terminology is currently in flux).

I have written an outline of what I hope to cover in my study and am in the process of re-drafting and getting this into a format appropriate for applying for the appropriate ethical clearances.

Another strand I am working on at the moment is trying to clarify what I understand by learning and which learning theories and ideas inform my understanding. This exploration has taken me through formal and informal learning, situated learning, communities of practice and currently metaphors of learning, as well as along a number of interesting side turnings.  I have read lots of interesting stuff and am slowly learning to sift out the things that have less relevance to my proposed study, however interesting they may be. Other posts in this blog summarise some of those explorations.

The other area I am beginning to explore is that of how disability is seen by society and the effect of disability on a family. This is not a major focus for me, but there is a fair bit of evidence showing that families with a disabled member are disadvantaged in lots of different ways and there is other evidence pointing to people with disabilities forming an underclass. If it can be shown that parents caring for children and young people on the spectrum have a great deal of knowledge and expertise in a number of different areas, this might challenge the power structure and also empower parents.

At the moment it feels as though there are a lot of different threads in something of a disarray and my task is to try to identify them and put them in some sort of order so that I can progress. A bit like sorting out lace bobbins and threads after the cat has knocked the lace pillow on the floor yet again. I’ll be more than happy if I can get these threads organised and begin to make something of them.

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22/01/2010 by lizit.

It never ceases to surprise me how easy it is to forget the things which are so obvious and so well known.

The presentation I did at the recent OpenCetl conference started by acknowledging the previous learning of OU students. My notes read:

Open University students, not surprisingly, are not blank canvases when they commence their OU studies. They bring with them a wide range of learning experiences from previous educational settings as well as a lifetime’s experience of informal learning in a wide variety of different contexts. The challenge confronting educators is how to enable students to maximise their use of existing learning skills while encouraging the development of new learning skills and strategies which are useful not only for study, but for life.

Further on in my notes, on the same theme, I wrote:

OU students are not a blank canvas. On their journey to becoming a student, they have engaged in formal education at school and possibly at college or university. From that experience they bring a range of expectations of what education offers and how learning is done. Alongside the positive experiences, they bring skeletons in the cupboard of poor teachers, badly prepared materials and negative feedback.

Many OU students bring with them experiences of workplace learning and training courses. Again, a mix of the good, the ugly and the indifferent, but again colouring expectations both of the learning experience and of contact with fellow students.

Almost all OU students will have engaged in a hobby or developed other specialised interests. Many will have learned the skills necessary to manage a home and care for a family. Some will have specialist knowledge of the care needs of people with disabilities or increasing frailty. Others have learned to cope with the challenge of a learning disability.

Increasingly, students will be familiar with the use of technology to obtain information or to manage aspects of daily living.

OU students like other adults are informal learners. They bring their informal learning skills with them into the formality of a structured academic course. How do we enable students to evaluate their informal learning toolkit, refine it and incorporate it into a new toolkit alongside the formal learning skills they will acquire during their OU study.

This morning, in the lab meeting, the focus was on learning and knowledge transfer and acquisition. I was reminded of Hager and Hodkinson’s (2009) comments about a person entering a new workplace - they bring with them knowledge, skills and experience, but the knowledge and skills will be changed and adapted and modified  and expanded through the experience of the new work place and belonging to a different community of practice.

Quinn makes a similar point in speaking about making connections with prior knowledge.

During the discussion this morning, the fairly obvious point was made that in any class of adult learners, or university students, everybody will be starting from a different point because of what they already know, their interests beyond study, etc.

Reflecting on this, I think of the number of times I have been involved in facilitating training of different sorts  or have been engaged with a member of staff in discussion about possible career progression. So often, my starting point has been talking about considering the ruc-sac of skills, abilities, experience, knowledge, ideas that we all carry with us and trying to move from the idea of compartmentalising what we know into discrete domains, into connecting the contents of the ruc-sac to whatever domain we happen to be occupying at the time. It strikes me that connectivity is an important part of any examination of adult learning - and connectivity is more than transfer.

Hager, P., & Hodkinson, P. (2009). Moving beyond the metaphor of transfer of learning. British Educational Research Journal, 35(4), 619 - 638.

Quinn, C. N. (2009). Social Networking: Bridging formal and informal learning. Learning Solutions Magazine.

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02/01/2010 by lizit.

I’m feeling really positive about where my DPhil is going as I move into the new year. Psychologically, I feel a sense of ownership both of what I am doing and how I am doing it.  I have a sense of purpose and direction and feel I am standing on solid ground rather than wading through a swamp. There is a lot of work to be done and I will need to be clear about what is possible and what isn’t  but the whole task feels much less daunting at this point in time. Whether I will feel the same in afew months time is another matter altogether!

If I look back 18 months to the earliest posts in this blog, I thought I knew what my DPhil would be about. What I did not expect was the experience of the past months, which has not only caused me to re-examine my assumptions, but has given me the time and space to read and think and to begin to formulate some of my own idea.

Some months ago, I wrote some notes which likened the DPhil process to making a piece of lace. When starting out, the pattern may not be at all clear, but it needs to be interpreted. Decisions have to be taken about where to start. It may even be that the pattern can be worked in more than one way. Past experience will be used in analysing the problem and it may well be necessary to seek the ideas of other lacemakers with greater or different experience. There may be new stitches to be learned through working samples. Decisions have to be made about threads - type and thickness - and more samples may be needed. Equipment needs to be assembled -  pillow, bobbins, cover cloths, pins, threads, scissors, etc. Even after all the preparation, the pattern needs to be set - a process that can involve a number of false starts. The first pattern repeat is inevitably challenging - working out which threads to introduce when and identifying the track they will take, where stitches can be worked in more than one way ensuring consistency in the number of twists. However, once the pattern is set and a few inches have been worked, it becomes much easier to see what needs to be done next - the pattern may even include repeats. To the non-lace maker, the pile of bobbins and mass of pins may look complex but the lacemaker can see what they are doing and trying to achieve. That does not mean there are no challenges - threads may break, errors may be made resulting in too many bobbins in the wrong place - and there may be near disasters if the pillow is knocked off its stand by an errant cat - but a process has been set in motion. That is until the point where thought has to be given to finishing the work and what to do with all the bobbins and threads so as to achieve a neat and tidy completion.

I feel as though I have done much of the preparation and am now gathering my equipment and tools together ready to start making lace. As with lace, this is a fairly solitary occupation, but there are opportunities for sharing, working together, and admiring other people’s work as the lace grows.

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02/01/2010 by lizit.

A wordle showing the key words in this blog over the last six months.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1498698/02012010

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21/07/2009 by lizit.

In supervision yesterday, Judith suggested I write an abstract of my thesis as though I had already undertaken the research.  I could see the practical value of this as I have been mulling over what I might actually do, rather than think about doing. Although I am working on a draft abstract, there are a couple of issues that are concerning me, both of which I now think I can see a way round or through.

The first is the so what question - and here again yesterday was helpful.  I can now see that what I want to show is very much related to why people engage in informal learning.  Although the government white paper is suggesting that informal learning should be recognised and supported, my position is that this is unnecessary and possibly counter-productive - and not just for the reasons propounded elsewhere in this blog of possibly repeating the errors of the 80s in relation to voluntary action and community care.

The second concern relates to justifying the use of Second Life for my studies.  One clear argument is that there are no inbuilt extrinsic rewards in SL.  Today it struck me that there are elements of SL learning which are not dissimilar to that happening in some of the physical world communities I am part of. For example, if I am monitoring SL mailing lists for evidence of informal learning (probably SLED and one other), I could also monitor arachne.  At about this point my imagination takes off and I have to remind myself that I haven’t got unlimited time and resources…. But if the SL can be shown to be not dissimilar from other communities which engage in informal learning…

Time for a cuppa.

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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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17/02/2009 by lizit.

A message on Plurk yesterday got me thinking about names a bit.  The question related to whether students could change their names on the OU system as somebody had had to endure an evening of being known by their given name as opposed to the name they are known by. I know how much my name matters to me - I just do not identify at all with my given name, and one of my priorities when I started at Sussex was to ensure wherever I could that my name got changed to ‘Liz’.  I do not know who is being addressed if anybody speaks to ‘Elizabeth’ - it sure isn’t me!  This can cause all manner of confusion at the doctors, dentists, etc.

I then got to thinking a bit about people I know, and particularly people I know better online than in real life. Very often we use different names with our online identities.  I am ‘lizit’ in most places and get quite cross when there is already a ‘lizit’ registered, which happens occasionally - how dare anybody have stolen my identity! When I think of my friends, I sometimes have to make a real effort to remember there real names when I am more used to using their virtual identity names.  I don’t think I’ve actually called anybody by anything other than their real name yet, but I do think of them by their virtual names.

So my real name is Liz.  I think of myself - and identify myself - as ‘lizit’.  I wonder what other people do - and what their relationship is between themselves and their different names? A further question, does how I think of myself have any bearing on the extent to which I am immersionist or augmentalist in my relationship to Second Life and other virtual environments?

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09/01/2009 by lizit.

Yesterday evening was thinking about blogs and how helpful or otherwise they are as a means of journaling.  I must admit to having reservations, which may be down to my use of the tool or something else, but which might be useful to identify to find work rounds or alternative approaches.

Firstly, each blog entry stands on it’s own.  I don’t get a sense of continuity or building on previous ideas or linking with earlier ideas.  It sometimes is possible to make the link to a recent post, but stuff I wrote 3 months ago might just as well have disappeared.  OK I can find stuff by going through the archives or searching on a tag - assuming the tags actually make some kind of sense - but it is though there are a number of building bricks scattered around with nothing to cement them together.

Secondly, there is a need to record some kind of semi-complete thoughts.  Because the blog format is at least semi-public - one or two people may see it other than me -  it means I need to write complete sentences and do so in some way that connects ideas.  It isn’t a place for scribbling the occasional word or idea or developing a mind map.  It is not really even a place for exploring ideas.  I guess, the positive bit of that is that it is a place to practice writing, but I’m not sure it is even good for that.

Thirdly, although the comment tool should permit some kind of conversation and development of ideas on specific topics, that doesn’t necessarily work.  I posted a blog a few days ago and asked some friends for their thoughts. I am not sure how many might have taken a look at what I had written, but none used the comment tool.  One used a micro-blog tool (responding to my original message) to say he had blogged back.  When I went to his blog there was a lengthy and though-provoking piece responding to my ideas - but unless I make a link, there is no link between my original post and his response.

Finally, for the moment, there is a problem in keeping up with what other people have written.  Although I am developing a blog roll, that means visiting other blogs fairly regularly to see if they have said anything interesting to me - and then sorting out how to bookmark the appropriate posts in a way I might be able to find them again. A few blogs have RSS feeds - how I love those.  The benefit there is I can add them to Google Reader and very quickly find out if there is anything I am interested in and then bookmark with del.icio.us.  But those without the feed, (and there is no feed on my blog as I don’t know how to add one) are simply a pain and potential cause of RSI as I click here, there and everywhere.

So what might be useful as a way of recording stuff.

Firstly, I use OneNote.  This is a way of recording a whole lot of information, both what I write myself and also ‘grabbing’ relevant emails and webpages on the fly.  What is more, I can then add my own comments to anything I put in OneNote, either using a stylus or typing stuff in.  The biggest disadvantage to OneNote is that it is not internet based so I need to keep my different computers synched with each other (and occasionally this leads to problems) but in general my stuff is accessible to me in an easily managed and accessible way.

Secondly, mapping tools.  My favourite is Inspiration, but there are loads of others around.  I can create an ideas map with lots of ideas relating to each other.  I can build linked layers.  I can link documents and web pages to the bubbles.  I end up with a resource that I can build, review and develop.

Thirdly, wikis offer an opportunity to write something and edit it and develop linked pages and ideas.  What is more, they can be edited by others.  I can’t help but think this would be a more joined up approach than a chain of ideas which may or may not be connected, such as is what my blog feels like.

Right, got that off my chest!

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