I like Jane Hart’s work on learning in organisations. And I like this presentation on 20 small changes to modernise the workplace learning experience. However, I am not so sure that the changes she advocates are so small. True each one on its own may represent just a small step forwards. But to be effective the changes need to be taken together. And that requires a big change on organisational practice. Many, if not most, organisations, especially Small and Medium Enterprises do not have the capacity to take these steps. That is why in the Learning Layers project we see capacity building as central to developing technology supported informal learning in SMEs. Capacity involves the confidence and competence of trainers and others who support learning, the understanding and support of managers, the physical infrastructure and perhaps most critically Continue reading
Category Archives: Wales Wide Web
Personal Learning Environments, Self Directed Learning and Context
Ten days ago I had an email from Alexander Mikroyannidis from the UK Open University. “Together with some colleagues from the EU project ROLE (http://www.role-project.eu)” he said, “I’m preparing a book to be published by Springer. It will be entitled “Personal Learning Environments in Practice” and it will present the results of applying PLEs in different test-beds in the project.
For each chapter, we have invited an external expert to provide a 2-page commentary that will also be published in the book. Would you be available to write such a commentary for the chapter that describes the vision of the project?”
How could I refuse? And here is my contribution:
Research and development in learning technologies is a fast moving field. Ideas and trends emerge, peak and die away as attention moves to the latest new thing. At the time of writing MOOCs dominate the discourse. Continue reading
Learning Toolbox
Tomorrow I am speaking at the 4th Annual Future Learning Lab conference in Kristiansand in Norway. The conference aims to target the interplay of learning, pedagogy issues, digital media and globalizing forces representing both opportunities, threats and new conditions. The conference web site says new ways and means of learning are paving their way into both formal education, work-life and leisure. Education technologies continue to evolve. Digital communication technology changed the music industry, the film industry and the news media as well as book publishing industry: Do we really think education and the learning field is any different? The media ecology that enables disruption, is global. The new networks being employed, are global. But the consequences and challenges are, for all practical purposes, local. And learning is still an aspect of social interaction as well as personal endeavor.
My presentation (see slide deck above) Continue reading
How do apprentices use mobile devices for learning?
Last autumn, we undertook a survey of how apprentices in the German construction industry use mobile devices. This was undertaken as part of the Learning Layers project. We produced a report on this work in December, when some 581 apprentices had completed the survey. Now we have more than 700 replies. We plan to update our analysis to include those who responded after that date. However a number of people have asked me for access to the report as it is and so I am publishing it on this blog.
In summary we found
- 86,7 per cent of apprentices survey have a smartphone, 19,4 per cent a tablet
- 94 per cent pay for internet connectivity themselves
- 55.6 per cent use their smartphone or tablet more than 10 times a day
- 42.8 per cent say they use their mobile or tablet often or very often for seeking work-related information. Continue reading
More on mobile work based learning
I have just read an interesting blog post on mobile learning (via the useful ADL mobile learning email list). Donald H Clark says:
Training Magazine’s annual survey of US L&D professionals shows that just 1.5% of training was delivered via mobile devices. That’s right, after about 7 years of hype and discussion we’ve reached 1.5%. That’s not leaping. That’s trench warfare.
And yet of course we use smart devices for learning all the time.
Every time we Google something, check a map for our location, quiz friends and colleagues for the answer to a question we are operating exactly in the sweet spot of L&D: we are learning something, or using a performance aid.
Of course we don’t call it that.
We call it ‘finding something out’, or ‘doing our job’. The learning is almost invisible because it is embedded in our daily lives; it didn’t require us Continue reading
How to make multimedia learning materials for the construction industry
by Graham Attwell, Owen Gray and Martina Luebbing
We wrote in an earlier post about the Rapid Turbine app which we are developing through the Learning Layers project. Rapid Turbine is a prototype demonstrator, designed to show the potential of mobile devices to support learning by apprentices in the north German construction industry training centre, Bau ABC. Apprentices at Bau ABC learn through undertaking a series of practical projects, detailed in a paper based White Folder.
The task sheets are used both outlining the tasks to be undertaken, the tools required, materials and health and safety concerns etc and for recording learning. Through developing a mobile app it is intended to make updating 0of tasks easier but most importantly to allow closer links between the learning apprentices undertake in the training centre, with their courses in vocational schools and with their work undertaken on construction sites.
The task we are Continue reading