Learn 4 Life

Outside the Wire - What lies ahead - Possible solutions and pointers? Making the map…

Image attribution to Bill Gracey on Flickr under this CC Licence

‘The revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviours‘ Clay Shirkey

That pithy sentence uttered in the new UsNow film couldn’t be more true, especially in the world of innovation in education that this blog constantly addresses.

So far this year I have been pulling focus on informal learning outside the wire of traditional institutions - in 2009 I am going to be more concerned with looking at the research and opinion that surrounds this arena and focus on highlighting and amplifying ideas and practice from individuals that might contribute to change in those places of learning and show concrete examples of how that practice demonstrates workable innovation - I’ll be searching out, interviewing and pushing practitioners, policy makers and others to reflect on how they think change can be brought about and banging on about 21st century learning, identity, curricula and literacy.

I’m not a researcher and I’m not an academic but I do have a passion for digital media and a drive to show others’ innovative practice going on now in schools, colleges and HE institutions. I think the change is happening too fast for academia and part of what this site is about is documenting and mapping those pivotal changes as they evolve through the eyes of those individuals who have the vision to innovate.

I’ve been interviewing people for over five years now and I am beginning to sense a wider change starting to happen so I’ll be out and about interviewing people on video about how innovation, informal learning and bottom up practice might change education in the UK and how it could do that in practical and scalable ways.

I’m not really interested in formalising this activity but more about disseminating how such behaviours might effect change in some small way or get people to consider doing things differently over time in both strategic and localised contexts within their own communities.

I’ll also be challenging policy makers to enter the debate and show some interest other than just through traditional media, soundbites or third party buffers - that certainly will be a challenge.

It should be a busy year.

Digital Literacy - On the Agenda at Last

Can you imagine teaching Digital Literacy using a chalkboard like this

Photo attribution aidan.expedition’s remasterfed Einstein photo on Flickr under this CC Licence

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis knows that I constantly monitor any references to Digital Literacy in the blogosphere and further afield. One of the recent tools I have been using to gather attention or smart focus on those two little words has been Tweet Beep, this alerts me via email to any mention of that phrase - I like to see who is micro-blogging, Tweeting, talking about this topic and any references to research that might be current. It winnows out the wheat from the chaff that comes out of the constant stream of information that is the Twitterverse and delivers the results right to my door in the form of choice tweets in an email.

One such one was this:

Joe Wilson's Twitter on NGUS

I follow Joe Wilson on a regular basis on Twitter and we have had some banter back and forth but I also follow nearly 600 hundred other people as well and sometimes I miss the nuggets that come out of this particular river of info. Tweet Beep helps me pan for gold and in this case it certainly filtered out a very rich seam indeed.

The Next Generation User Skills Report was commissioned by Joe - it is a pretty substantial piece of research just published and I consider it to be one of the most important documents to come out about Digital Literacy in the UK. It is a “must read” for anyone interested in our future.

Quite simply, what it does is examine the idea that there is a productivity gap in the Scottish workplace that Higher Order ICT skills could help close. Ostensibly this is a document produced for the Scottish Qualifications Authority but it is extremely pertinent to the UK as a whole and examines developments in US, Europe and the rest of the UK. It looks at defining a basic set of skills (Next Generation User Skills) and identifying the gaps that exist in provision in the run up to 2013. It doesn’t set out to attempt to solve how to do this but is a very thorough analysis of the lay of the land at the moment.

I particularly liked the fact that, together with a project in Yorkshire and Humber, they were able to break down and map those gaps in provision against existing qualifications, awards and pedagogy in the UK and see how that might project against possible needs of employers and other stakeholders- at last - some informed vision but it isn’t prescriptive in any way.

I also love the fact, unlike a lot of BECTA publications which have a lot of slick photos and very little thought about deep content, this publication has a lot of very simple diagrams, charts and visual representations of data that are right to the point - that’s a big plus.

There’s a lot of variety in there with a lot of thought going into visual representation especially with clear colour coding and shading but it’s not overly slick -  and design doesn’t overwhelm content.

You are also presented with open questions in the form of prompts for writing at the end of the report to enable you to reflect on the content in the light of the research - this worked for me - it made me actually think about/ make notes on what I had read. I have rarely seen so much thought put into the way information is presented.

So we are encouraged to think about Employability & workplace skills, pedagogy, qualifications, identity, informal learning, digital citizenship and a host of other variables – and reflect on what are needs in terms of filling the shortfalls by 2013, through the focus of IT & digital literacy skills. The way ICT is mapped onto the curriculum is very well covered and the suggestion is that ICT is no longer a discreet skillset to be taught, once ubiquity of conditions for learning with ICT becomes the norm, seems an obvious outcome.

I’m not going to go into any more depth because I haven’t the time here to precis the whole thing. Instead - download it from here and do that yourself now - it’s a 57 page PDF document but I repeat it is one of the best pieces of analysis of the Digital Literacy Landscape I have read in recent years.

It’s timely and it sparks a debate about where we go from here. At last someone has done the groundwork to prepare authoritative reflection on systemic and cultural change in this area.

If you are a policy maker in the UK and you do not read it - you will be seriously uninformed.

David Kay, Bob McGonigle, Walter Patterson  and Barbara Tabbiner have done an excellent job here.

Download and read it now!