EdTechUK

Closed systems are dead, announces OU Vice Chancellor

Last Wednesday I went to the launch event for OpenLearn, a £5.65m project funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. OpenLearn aims to make 5,000 hours of Open University course content available online, free of charge by April 2008. 

After the release of materials by MIT, It’s fantastic to be able to report that a British institution is able to see and realize the value of openly accessible materials. Vice Chancellor Professor Brenda Gourley’s opening speech highlighted the importance of open standards and open education, outlining "...the trend towards the all-access economy (open access, open source etc), closed systems are dead; open is the new standard. This site is open, free to use by anybody and subject only to Creative Commons licensing protocols."

Professor Gourley also drew a neat comparison to the previous pioneering work undertaken by the Open University in partnership with the BBC to the current XML based initiative. I grew up watching bearded men explain particle physics on a Sunday morning, and later stayed up far too late fascinated by the wonderful Stuart Hall. So far I haven’t studied formally with the OU, but I’ve certainly benefited, along with many millions of other people, from their output and their commitment to social justice and education for all.  The transcript/film of Professor Gourley’s speech isn’t up yet - I’ll link as soon as.

I also got to say hi (after my nine year old son had finished with him) to Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the School's Center for Internet and Society. All OpenLearn materials are free for use under a flexible Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons copyright license. Prof Lessig delivered a brief keynote, as did Bill Rammell, UK Minister of State for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education.

Check out the OpenLearn site for currently available materials and the LabSpace site (not sure what the joined finger sign means, presuming its nothing too rude), a community and meeting space I’ll write more about once I’ve had a chance to look around.

Personalisation

Personalisation has emerged as a key concept in the UK government’s vision for public service sector reform, and facilitating personalisation in seen as crucial to the ongoing development of state provision. Charles Leadbeater has compellingly argued that meaningful personalisation implies not just a choice of services for citizens to decide between (which school or hospital to receive the services of) but the active participation of citizens in designing services; in determining what those services deliver, and how. While personalisation seems to designed to directly address and compensate for social inequalities, both choice and the more radical approach of participation raise serious questions about the extent to which personalisation excludes the already disadvantaged.

Anyone who has heard me talk recently will know that what personalisation means, how we define it, and how we recognise planning and provision which account for it, is something that I'm thinking a lot about right now.  Personalisation is the broader context currently informing UK discussion around e-portfolios, Personal Learning Environments, as well as broader educational provision. As such, how we understand it has the potential to empower or exclude learners. Tomorrow I'll be posting AoC NILTA's position statement over at my work blog,

This approach is hardly radical and won't come as a big surprise to anyone working in the field. My starting point is Point 27 of the recently released UK FE White Paper which calls for “Increasing personalisation so that individual needs and circumstances are built into the design and delivery of education and training”. I'd argue that it is precisely this kind of misguided assurance - that the scope of individual needs and circumstances can be anticipated to the extent that they can be built in to provision and delivered to learners - that leads to exclusionary practice.

Josie Fraser, October 2006 (click for larger version)

Currently, when we look at approaches within education, we can see that the discussion is predominately focused on adaptive personalisation (Ferguson, Schmoller, Smith 2004) (for example registration, tracking, identity management) and customisation (Ferguson, Schmoller, Smith 2004) (choice between predetermined elements of provision). While I'm not dismissing the importance of both of these elements, at all, I would say that a discussion of personalisation that stops at customisation is not good enough. What we also have to factor in, if we are serious about supporting their learning and teaching experiences and recognising their differences, needs and preferences is the acknowledgment of and opportunity for dynamic personalisation to take it's place. 

15 February 2007: AoC NILTA response to DfES Consultation Paper - Personalising Further Education: Developing a Vision

The AoC NILTA responce to Personalising Further Education: Developing a Vision was the last substantial consultation I worked on for NILTA. During my time as their ICT and e-learning development officer, personalisation - what it might mean and how it might look within formal education - was one of my major focuses.

Initial Comments

1. Personalised learning underpins the programme of change outlined in the recent FE White Paper. This includes emphasis on effective assessment of initial learner needs, improving pastoral support, along with developing learner ‘voice and choice’ through participation and representation. The intention is to improve learner engagement, achievement and progression across the board and influence the shape of future provision.

Institutions would argue that significant aspects of personalised learning is already a reality for their learners: that they already have well developed systems in place and a well developed ethos that puts learners and their individual needs at the heart of what they do.

Personalising Further Education: Developing a Vision is a DfES sector-wide consultation which seeks to develop and take forward a shared understanding of personalisation within the FE system.

This response seeks to highlight the definition of personalisation outlined in the consultation document, particularly in the context of electronic environments and to review the proposed changes to current roles, activities and procedures.

2. AoC NILTA supports the assertion made in the document that personalising learning has an integral role in improving quality. Our vision is for the nationwide provision of learning appropriate to and accessible by every individual, that recognises individual learners’ circumstances, and supports their needs and aspirations.  We believe that this cannot be achieved without strategic development of technological solutions in all aspects of an institution’s engagement with the learner, including: recruitment, enrolment, monitoring, support, tutoring, learning and teaching, advice and guidance, assessment and reporting and progression.

3. We regret the lack of emphasis on how ILT will support the aims outlined in the personalisation strategy. Although the use of technology is clearly understood to play a role in the systemic changes necessary to support widespread personalisation, we do not believe that the document recognises the extent to which the exploitation and application of ICT will be necessary to support personalisation. We would be keen to explore the range of ways technology, particularly collaborative and user content-creation tools can be used to support the personalisation agenda and the specific areas identified by the document. We would expect the personalisation agenda to rely on and further support the embedding of ICT and e-learning across all aspects of educational provision and facilitation.

4. We would refer to the recent report of the Gilbert Committee ‘2020 vision: Report of the Teaching and Learning 2020 Review Group’ which identifies ways in which technology might contribute to personalised learning. We believe that there are many benefits that are generic to learners and therefore consistent across sectors.  We encourage the colleagues within the Department to work in partnership across the sectors in developing strategy.

5. We are committed to working with the Department and its partners in the delivery of this strategy to ensure that e-strategy is embedded into relevant delivery strategies and projects, and to ensure that the views and needs of the post-16 sector are recognised and accounted for. The deployment of technologies within the context of coherent and comprehensive e-strategy within institutions, and the associated organisational and cultural change are not optional. This is not recognized within the consultation document and we believe that this is a serious omission.

6. We are delighted that participation is seen as a key process of the facilitation of personalised learning. We fully agree with the importance given to this form of engagement – empowering and supporting learners to shape the services they receive, and recognising the important contribution learners can make to improve the quality of educational provision.

However, we are keen that participatory personalisation is not limited to consultation and evaluation, but that the contribution that user participation that empowers learners to take initiative and control is supported in order to realise the government’s vision for a transformed, innovative and world-leading sector.

7. We are in agreement that personalisation has the potential to be an effective strategy for engaging all learners, and could operate as a particularly effective mechanism for engaging vulnerable, disadvantaged and disengaged young people. We are keen to see all learners’ circumstances, needs and preferences adequately recognised and appropriately supported. We believe that personalisation is not simply a matter of determining what learners or groups of learners need – it requires the more complex approach of supporting people in their own exploration and articulation of their needs, both in collaboration with other learners and in their independent contribution to their own learning.

8. We welcome the intention to expand and to harmonise existing provision. More focused support, greater one-to-one time, staff development, introducing and establishing new systems – all of these require the provision of sufficient time and resource. We would expect to see a significant financial commitment to support the systemic extension of services proposed for the sector, particularly in terms of staff development and time.

9. We are surprised by the lack of reference to innovation within the framework. We would expect that the emerging practices associated with supporting personalisation would call for creative thinking and solutions. We would like to see provision for the encouragement, support and sharing of innovative responses to the facilitation of personalisation.

10. “…personalisation has a role in encouraging and engaging those not currently in learning by capturing the views of potential learners and creating learning opportunities in which they want to participate.” (p.8). While we support the proposed relationship between learner views and the opportunities presented to them, it is not clear how or to what degree this is being proposed. We are concerned that personalisation should not be misrecognised as a lever which can be applied in order to elicit a narrow band of response. We believe that if the vision of personalisation is realised – the re-shaping of service provision in line with learner need, ability and preference, in the context of employer and national skills needs – then in addition to the implications for service structure and delivery, evaluation and assessment will have to be significantly reviewed.

11. The document refers to the development of the ‘expert learner’. We support this as a necessary element of success in improving retention and achievement.  We would wish to raise within this the need to consider the digital literacy that learners will need to develop to support their learning, utilising what are for some very well developed digital skills within their learning process.

However we recognize that while many young learners are already at an advanced stage of digital skills and will come into Further Education with a mindset / skill set that will naturally assume the use of e-skills as part of their learning process, other learners have not yet developed this level of digital knowledge and skills.

12. We are concerned that this is not recognised as part of the learner need and therefore as integral to any strategy for meeting learner needs. Teachers need to recognise that digital skills may not equate to digital literacy; learners may be confident but lack the critical skills to support their own learning and future careers. We would also remind colleagues within the Department that there needs to be parity in digital accessibility across the sector(s) and for the individual

13. We welcome the reference to improved assessment for learners.  Personalising assessment, particularly with regard to assessing when ready rather than to a predetermined timetable and the ability to recognize and accommodate a range of evidence and ways of working, has the potential to greatly enhance motivation and achievement.  We are disappointed that the role of e-assessment and e-portfolio is not explicitly recognized within this, as development in these areas will be crucial to the success of this element of the strategy.

14. If personalisation is to be truly meaningful to the individual we need to be actively engaging with e-assessment, e-portfolios, unique learner numbers and with the current and potential practices made possible by web 2.0 technologies.

15. We agree that tailoring the service to the learner must apply to the whole learner journey and not just parts of it.  We encourage the strategy to consider the various elements of the learner journey – initial assessment, student representation, tutor/broker support, student evaluation, more flexible qualifications etc. holistically, ensuring that they are joined up and the danger of silo development is avoided, particularly with regard to the supporting systems and infrastructure.

16. We advise careful consideration needs to be taken regarding the question of access and control of the electronic environments and data contained within them at different stages in the learners journey.  This is particularly pertinent for younger learners as their legal status changes from age 14 to 16 to 18+

17 We fully support the need for synergy and consistency across sectors, ensuring the learner experience is seamless at all stages of their learning journey.  We would encourage further integration across sectors of work such as MIAP to ensure that the data and systems used to support learners are consistent and accessible.  We would also encourage strategies to ensure investment and development across the sectors is equitable to ensure that the resources (particularly e-resources) are consistent across providers.

18. We are concerned by the lack of reference to the data and systems requirements that will need to be identified and developed to support the aspirations for improved student identification and support. We welcome the work of MIAP in developing the unique learner number (ULN). We would recommend a focus on data portability, data ownership and lifelong learning within these agendas.

19. In light of the above comments we stress the importance of strategic review of business processes within colleges and also for the careful planning of ICT infrastructure, taking account issues such as cost of ownership, the need to deliver seamless managed learning environments, simple data transfer and availability and minimizing risks of staff skill shortages.  We believe that personalisation initiatives introduced in the absence of system-wide changes in business processes are likely to fail.

Annex A after the jump.

Annex A

Definitions

Defining personalisation:

“In an educational setting, personalisation means working in partnership with the learner and employer - to tailor their learning experience and pathways, according to their needs and personal objectives – in a way which delivers success.” (p. 7)

We agree that personalisation is not just something that is ‘done to’ the learner – it is a description of a relationship between the provider and the learner where the learner’s experience, needs, preferences and opinions are respected and responded to – a realisation of the rights as well as the responsibilities appropriate to each party.
AoC NILTA has produced a model of Personalisation in Electronic Environments which we would like to extend here in terms of a definition of personalised provision:

Adaptive personalisation:

This refers to the pre-organised provision of a personalised experience. Learners may be able to access the same process from a different location, complete tasks at their own pace, or are presented with a range of tools and access determined by their username. While this offers a tailored experience to each learner, differentiation is based upon the curriculum, the category of learner or the learner as a member of an organisation, rather than as an individual. We can broadly categorise this as institutional provision and procedure.

The Managing Information Across Partners (MIAP) initiative provides a good example of this kind of personalisation – a range of learner information and requirements can be transferred between intuitions in order to provide continuous learner support.

Customisation:

This enables the learner to engage with institutional provision. An example of this within the terms of the document would be a learner choosing which modules to select to complete a course of study, or standing for a recognized student council role.

“The development of Specialised Diplomas as a modular qualification with young people taking different modules or qualifications in different institutions…” (p.17) is a clear example of customisation.

Dynamic personalisation:

This refers to what we regard as learner-led personalisation: support and acknowledgement for the learner to create, write, collaborate and direct content and activity within the contexts of their own choosing. This is the institution engaging with the learner. There is little evidence of how this type of personalisation will be supported within the document, although the intention to equip learners with the skills to negotiate and design their own learning journeys is indicative of this kind of activity.

The AoC NILTA responce to Personalising Further Education: Developing a Vision was the last substantial consultation I worked on for NILTA. During my time as their ICT and e-learning development officer, personalisation - what it might mean and how it might look within formal education - was one of my major focuses.

Initial Comments

1. Personalised learning underpins the programme of change outlined in the recent FE White Paper. This includes emphasis on effective assessment of initial learner needs, improving pastoral support, along with developing learner ‘voice and choice’ through participation and representation. The intention is to improve learner engagement, achievement and progression across the board and influence the shape of future provision.

Institutions would argue that significant aspects of personalised learning is already a reality for their learners: that they already have well developed systems in place and a well developed ethos that puts learners and their individual needs at the heart of what they do.

Personalising Further Education: Developing a Vision is a DfES sector-wide consultation which seeks to develop and take forward a shared understanding of personalisation within the FE system.

This response seeks to highlight the definition of personalisation outlined in the consultation document, particularly in the context of electronic environments and to review the proposed changes to current roles, activities and procedures.

2. AoC NILTA supports the assertion made in the document that personalising learning has an integral role in improving quality. Our vision is for the nationwide provision of learning appropriate to and accessible by every individual, that recognises individual learners’ circumstances, and supports their needs and aspirations.  We believe that this cannot be achieved without strategic development of technological solutions in all aspects of an institution’s engagement with the learner, including: recruitment, enrolment, monitoring, support, tutoring, learning and teaching, advice and guidance, assessment and reporting and progression.

3. We regret the lack of emphasis on how ILT will support the aims outlined in the personalisation strategy. Although the use of technology is clearly understood to play a role in the systemic changes necessary to support widespread personalisation, we do not believe that the document recognises the extent to which the exploitation and application of ICT will be necessary to support personalisation. We would be keen to explore the range of ways technology, particularly collaborative and user content-creation tools can be used to support the personalisation agenda and the specific areas identified by the document. We would expect the personalisation agenda to rely on and further support the embedding of ICT and e-learning across all aspects of educational provision and facilitation.

4. We would refer to the recent report of the Gilbert Committee ‘2020 vision: Report of the Teaching and Learning 2020 Review Group’ which identifies ways in which technology might contribute to personalised learning. We believe that there are many benefits that are generic to learners and therefore consistent across sectors.  We encourage the colleagues within the Department to work in partnership across the sectors in developing strategy.

5. We are committed to working with the Department and its partners in the delivery of this strategy to ensure that e-strategy is embedded into relevant delivery strategies and projects, and to ensure that the views and needs of the post-16 sector are recognised and accounted for. The deployment of technologies within the context of coherent and comprehensive e-strategy within institutions, and the associated organisational and cultural change are not optional. This is not recognized within the consultation document and we believe that this is a serious omission.

6. We are delighted that participation is seen as a key process of the facilitation of personalised learning. We fully agree with the importance given to this form of engagement – empowering and supporting learners to shape the services they receive, and recognising the important contribution learners can make to improve the quality of educational provision.

However, we are keen that participatory personalisation is not limited to consultation and evaluation, but that the contribution that user participation that empowers learners to take initiative and control is supported in order to realise the government’s vision for a transformed, innovative and world-leading sector.

7. We are in agreement that personalisation has the potential to be an effective strategy for engaging all learners, and could operate as a particularly effective mechanism for engaging vulnerable, disadvantaged and disengaged young people. We are keen to see all learners’ circumstances, needs and preferences adequately recognised and appropriately supported. We believe that personalisation is not simply a matter of determining what learners or groups of learners need – it requires the more complex approach of supporting people in their own exploration and articulation of their needs, both in collaboration with other learners and in their independent contribution to their own learning.

8. We welcome the intention to expand and to harmonise existing provision. More focused support, greater one-to-one time, staff development, introducing and establishing new systems – all of these require the provision of sufficient time and resource. We would expect to see a significant financial commitment to support the systemic extension of services proposed for the sector, particularly in terms of staff development and time.

9. We are surprised by the lack of reference to innovation within the framework. We would expect that the emerging practices associated with supporting personalisation would call for creative thinking and solutions. We would like to see provision for the encouragement, support and sharing of innovative responses to the facilitation of personalisation.

10. “…personalisation has a role in encouraging and engaging those not currently in learning by capturing the views of potential learners and creating learning opportunities in which they want to participate.” (p.8). While we support the proposed relationship between learner views and the opportunities presented to them, it is not clear how or to what degree this is being proposed. We are concerned that personalisation should not be misrecognised as a lever which can be applied in order to elicit a narrow band of response. We believe that if the vision of personalisation is realised – the re-shaping of service provision in line with learner need, ability and preference, in the context of employer and national skills needs – then in addition to the implications for service structure and delivery, evaluation and assessment will have to be significantly reviewed.

11. The document refers to the development of the ‘expert learner’. We support this as a necessary element of success in improving retention and achievement.  We would wish to raise within this the need to consider the digital literacy that learners will need to develop to support their learning, utilising what are for some very well developed digital skills within their learning process.

However we recognize that while many young learners are already at an advanced stage of digital skills and will come into Further Education with a mindset / skill set that will naturally assume the use of e-skills as part of their learning process, other learners have not yet developed this level of digital knowledge and skills.

12. We are concerned that this is not recognised as part of the learner need and therefore as integral to any strategy for meeting learner needs. Teachers need to recognise that digital skills may not equate to digital literacy; learners may be confident but lack the critical skills to support their own learning and future careers. We would also remind colleagues within the Department that there needs to be parity in digital accessibility across the sector(s) and for the individual

13. We welcome the reference to improved assessment for learners.  Personalising assessment, particularly with regard to assessing when ready rather than to a predetermined timetable and the ability to recognize and accommodate a range of evidence and ways of working, has the potential to greatly enhance motivation and achievement.  We are disappointed that the role of e-assessment and e-portfolio is not explicitly recognized within this, as development in these areas will be crucial to the success of this element of the strategy.

14. If personalisation is to be truly meaningful to the individual we need to be actively engaging with e-assessment, e-portfolios, unique learner numbers and with the current and potential practices made possible by web 2.0 technologies.

15. We agree that tailoring the service to the learner must apply to the whole learner journey and not just parts of it.  We encourage the strategy to consider the various elements of the learner journey – initial assessment, student representation, tutor/broker support, student evaluation, more flexible qualifications etc. holistically, ensuring that they are joined up and the danger of silo development is avoided, particularly with regard to the supporting systems and infrastructure.

16. We advise careful consideration needs to be taken regarding the question of access and control of the electronic environments and data contained within them at different stages in the learners journey.  This is particularly pertinent for younger learners as their legal status changes from age 14 to 16 to 18+

17 We fully support the need for synergy and consistency across sectors, ensuring the learner experience is seamless at all stages of their learning journey.  We would encourage further integration across sectors of work such as MIAP to ensure that the data and systems used to support learners are consistent and accessible.  We would also encourage strategies to ensure investment and development across the sectors is equitable to ensure that the resources (particularly e-resources) are consistent across providers.

18. We are concerned by the lack of reference to the data and systems requirements that will need to be identified and developed to support the aspirations for improved student identification and support. We welcome the work of MIAP in developing the unique learner number (ULN). We would recommend a focus on data portability, data ownership and lifelong learning within these agendas.

19. In light of the above comments we stress the importance of strategic review of business processes within colleges and also for the careful planning of ICT infrastructure, taking account issues such as cost of ownership, the need to deliver seamless managed learning environments, simple data transfer and availability and minimizing risks of staff skill shortages.  We believe that personalisation initiatives introduced in the absence of system-wide changes in business processes are likely to fail.

Annex A after the jump.

Annex A

Definitions

Defining personalisation:

“In an educational setting, personalisation means working in partnership with the learner and employer - to tailor their learning experience and pathways, according to their needs and personal objectives – in a way which delivers success.” (p. 7)

We agree that personalisation is not just something that is ‘done to’ the learner – it is a description of a relationship between the provider and the learner where the learner’s experience, needs, preferences and opinions are respected and responded to – a realisation of the rights as well as the responsibilities appropriate to each party.
AoC NILTA has produced a model of Personalisation in Electronic Environments which we would like to extend here in terms of a definition of personalised provision:

Adaptive personalisation:

This refers to the pre-organised provision of a personalised experience. Learners may be able to access the same process from a different location, complete tasks at their own pace, or are presented with a range of tools and access determined by their username. While this offers a tailored experience to each learner, differentiation is based upon the curriculum, the category of learner or the learner as a member of an organisation, rather than as an individual. We can broadly categorise this as institutional provision and procedure.

The Managing Information Across Partners (MIAP) initiative provides a good example of this kind of personalisation – a range of learner information and requirements can be transferred between intuitions in order to provide continuous learner support.

Customisation:

This enables the learner to engage with institutional provision. An example of this within the terms of the document would be a learner choosing which modules to select to complete a course of study, or standing for a recognized student council role.

“The development of Specialised Diplomas as a modular qualification with young people taking different modules or qualifications in different institutions…” (p.17) is a clear example of customisation.

Dynamic personalisation:

This refers to what we regard as learner-led personalisation: support and acknowledgement for the learner to create, write, collaborate and direct content and activity within the contexts of their own choosing. This is the institution engaging with the learner. There is little evidence of how this type of personalisation will be supported within the document, although the intention to equip learners with the skills to negotiate and design their own learning journeys is indicative of this kind of activity.

Elgg Spaces launch interview with Dave & Ben

The workaholics making up Team Elgg continue to win friends and gain influence: 

Elgg recently appeared in NetworkWorld's 2006 Vendors to the All-Stars major industry player dominated list as Saugus Union School District (California, US) won an award in the Applications category for their use of the platform.

Over in the UK, The University of Brighton just added to Elgg's international portfolio of implementations - the process is being well blogumented by Stan Stanier. They're also continuing to work on new and improved features which are going to be previewed in Oxford this week, informally (i.e. beer will be available to buy in the immediate vicinity) at Tuesday's user group meetup and at Wednesday's EIfEL Plugfest.   

If all this wasn't enough, they're just about to launch Elgg Spaces. Unsurprisingly, the indomitable Leon Cych already scooped me on the Spaces venture with his interview with Ben Werdmuller over at Y.uk?   
- but hey, maybe your speakers are broken. Dave Tosh and Ben W. were nice enough to answer some questions - thanks guys!

Who’s involved in the Elgg team?

The core of Elgg is Dave Tosh and Ben Werdmuller: we developed the idea collaboratively around the time we were both still working at the University of Edinburgh, and it's still the two of us that develop most of the ideas and keep the project turning. We've got a pretty good split between us, which means that, once we've decided what we're going to do, Ben spend most of his time sitting writing code and Dave will develop interfaces and spend time talking to potential users and customers. We both put a lot of hours in, because ultimately, we really believe in it - we've been doing this for almost three years already, and we want to see it work.

We've been lucky over the past year or so to have the involvement of Misja Hoebe from CHN University, who has become an integral part of our team. He's brought in a very handy third perspective, and it's always useful having a third person when you're voting on whether to do something or not. There have been a huge number of three-way Skype calls between us, talking about virtually every Elgg feature that's emerged since last summer.

More recently, we've been working with Chris Johnson, a Sloan MBA who until recently was part of OpenCourseWare, and Sasan Salari, one of the co-founders of WebCT. Again, they've brought invaluable perspectives, this time relating to how we do business and market to the outside world - something we haven't necessarily been so good at.

Finally, Kevin Jardine has been working with us of late. He used to be head of cyberactivism at Greenpeace, and has been hard at work coding OpenID and a new presentation tool, amongst other things for Elgg (some of this development work has been made possible by OpenAcademic – a project we set up with Bill Fitzgerald and Marc Poris, see below). As a programmer he's incredibly sharp and insightful, and we're really lucky to have him on board for these functions.

We're also working with Bill Fitzgerald and Marc Poris over at Funny Monkey on the OpenAcademic project, which integrates Elgg, Drupal, MediaWiki and other projects together into a turnkey educational solution.

One of the real strengths of Elgg has been that nobody on the project, apart for us (Ben and Dave), would be working with us if they hadn't found the project through the software itself. The Elgg team itself serves as proof that Elgg works well for bringing people with similar interests together.

Can you explain the difference between Elgg, Curverider and Elgg Spaces?

Elgg is the social networking software. It's open source, so anyone can download it, and it's been designed to be easily modified. We're giving that away to the community under a GPL licence.

Curverider Ltd is the company we set up to provide Elgg support, development and consultancy services. If you want to use Elgg and have access to the level of  commercial support you'd expect with a commercial partner, we provide that. These’s also Elgg Spaces and a series of commercial blogs, and planning and preperation going on around a bunch of additional services that will be emerging in the near future in the future.

Elgg Spaces is a service provided by Curverider that allows anyone to run an Elgg installation without installing it on their own servers. You sign up to the site, fill in some information, and your installation is automatically set up. We maintain the server and keep Elgg updated to the latest stable version. It's subscription based, with options to add extra plugins in the future.

It's perfect for people who don 't want the hassle of their own installation and maintenance.

How did Elgg Spaces come about?

Ben: We think Elgg is a great product, but the major issue is that a lot of the people who want to use it don't have the technical skills to install it or the relevant infrastructure. If they do, great: they can still always grab the latest version for free, and we do standard open source things like make our code repository world-readable so anyone can grab the latest version of the code as we work on it. But more and more people were asking us if we could host it for them, and it made sense to create a service for this.

It's priced very fairly, so that even if you do have the IT infrastructure to support Elgg in-house, it may be more cost effective to just buy an Elgg Spaces account, particularly when you factor in the upgrades. We're likely to provide some Spaces-specific  functionality, too, including services for business intranets.

Dave: The thing about new technologies and approaches is that users should be spending their time using the software, exploring the possibilities it affords and get use from it – not worrying about the install, upgrades, bug fixes etc. this is why Elgg Spaces was developed; to let people use Elgg for what it was designed for, without any hassle. Plus, plenty of people were asking for it, so it made sense.

Whats the level of interest been so far in Elgg Spaces?

It's been huge; Elgg Spaces is definitely the #1 thing we're asked about. Our list of people who want to be notified when we release it to the public is growing pretty long, and we're really excited about emailing them all and letting them in.

I think for a lot of people it just makes more sense, and Elgg is now at the level where it can support this kind of heavy use. There are still a lot of people who haven't been able to see what it can do, and Elgg Spaces should really help that. Even in-house, it's making it a lot easier for us to create new installations for people. We have a couple of pet projects we'll quietly release amongst all the customer sites.

What do the Elgg Team see themselves doing over the next couple of years?

Ben: By this time next year, Elgg will have hit version 1, and I genuinely believe it will have become one of the most influential e-learning software platforms in the world. We have a whole set of ideas we haven't implemented yet, and I think distributed authentication - the ability to participate in all kinds of different communities all over the web but still retain your single login and profile - is going to be revolutionary. We're also hard at work developing a full open API to make it easier for people to build awesome plugins to stick on top of Elgg; we've already got some neat ones from people like Orange, but it's important to us that the barrier for extending Elgg is as low as it can possibly be.

When you put those things together with existing features like multiple languages, site-wide tagging, granular RSS and access restrictions on individual items on data, this is going to change the way people look at collaborative environments.

And to think we give it away for free ...

I think over the next couple of years the landscape of e-learning will change significantly, at least in terms of what people want out of the tools they use.  I think we will be an integral part of that.

Dave: That is a hard question to answer as you never know what twists and turns life throws at you; this equally applies to software development. Elgg is shaping up well and we are noticing a considerable change in the way people look at learner centered environments.

We don’t learn, or work or live in isolation or in silos : Elgg recognizes and facilitates the connections that people want to make and the ways people want to learn and interact.

If nothing else, I hope it gets more people talking about the potential of what is out there and how it can be used.

More PLE questions

Some interesting questions being raised about Personal Learning Landscapes across the blogosphere right now. This recent post by Juliette White,  a couple by Catherine Howell.

Also - for background and kudos, this post by Stephen Powell which really well sums up what the thinking was following the June Cetis PLE meeting.

One of the projects I'm currently working on is as an Advisory Board member to the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) 2007 Horizon Report. Here are some of the 2006 trends which are currently being carried over:

* '''Dynamic knowledge creation and social computing tools and processes are becoming more widespread and accepted.''' No longer in their infancy, tools for working collaboratively at a distance are easier to use and more commonly available than in previous years. It is no longer unusual to attend a conference online or to contribute to a project wiki. As the tools have matured, the practice of online communication and collaboration has increased. This trend is at the heart of social computing and is driving personal broadcasting as well.

* '''Mobile and personal technology is increasingly being viewed as a delivery platform for services of all kinds.'''  The presence of small devices like cell phones or mp3 players being carried about everywhere is almost a given; delivering content to those devices simply makes sense. This trend is growing in the consumer arena and is beginning to be felt in education as well. The ubiquity of these devices has enabled personal broadcasting (podcasting and vlogging) to take off almost overnight, and that is just the first wave of broadband content that will be ported to phones in the next few years.

* '''Consumers are increasingly expecting individualized services, tools, and experiences, and open access to media, knowledge, information, and learning.''' The demand for personalized content and services, increasingly met by savvy retailers and service providers, and greatly enabled by the ability of the Internet to allow marketers to meet individualized needs will surface with increasing frequency in the world of academia.   Scholarly and cultural institutions are already beginning to differentiate themselves along these dimensions and that can be expected to continue and accelerate for some time.

* '''Collaboration is increasingly seen as critical across the range of educational activities, including intra- and inter-institutional activities of any size or scope.''' As the ways in which researchers, students and teachers can collaborate with each other increase, knowledge is becoming a community property, and the construction of knowledge, a community activity. A renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is leading to an exploration of the science of gaming, context-aware environments and devices, and their application for teaching and learning.

To me, the whole PLE project is an attempt to articulate and address these interwoven changes
- articulating the conceptual shift that acknowledges the reality of distributed learning practices and the range of learner preference. In that sense, a PLE could be described as basically a mechanism, process or interface through which a wide spread of data, conversations, ideas etc are able to be constructed, organised, accessed and presented.

This might suggest that the current state of web 2.0 is great, that all we need to do is work out some way of feeding our flickr account and a bunch of blog posts and comments into a CMS so that it can be evaluated and/or repackaged into a CV/research bid/presentation friendly format.  I don’t think this is the case though – I think that we’re currently limited in articulating what a potential PLE might be like by a lack of diverse examples. We also need a wider range of organisations involved – for example, the exam boards – in order to continue to check the formal and institutional limits of what’s possible. The CETIS Team have done a great job building an example of a desk-based version (although as someone who loathes desk-based aps, this wouldn’t in practice appeal to me), and the Elgg team have done a trailblazing job producing the first example of a web-based working version.

The PLE debates are stirring up a bunch of stuff, in their focus on the ways in which people learn across and between communities and networks, and the importance of synthesis and creating connections. They also raise a host of difficult technical, legal and organisational issues.

I’m coming at this from a very specific angle and other people will have different concerns– great. The thing that most excites me about the PLE at the moment that it isn’t fixed or settled, that it’s fundamentally a conversation across the edtech community about what learners need, what institutions might be providing, which PLE methods might be most useful. I see it as a practical attempt to get beyond the current dichotomy between closed CMS’s vs the small pieces approaches, by pushing innovators and institutions to develop and explore tools and platforms where communities and individuals can themselves determine boundaries, permeability and connections.