It's all integral

Now here’s an interesting one.

Evil’s a strong word, and a word that seems to belong to another era. Does any of the behaviour of modern British society cause enough misery that it deserves to be called a Social Evil?

When this popped up it made me think … hard.

I suppose quite a few things might be considered “evil” but what differentiates a social evil from just any old evil? It sems too easy to slip into thinking abut evils in either totally abstract terms (such as poverty, war, disease) or list current preoccupations such as terrorism or street crime. Some might even be tempted to ascribe the term social evil to specific groups – there’s always been one marginalised group, Teddy boys, Mods, skinheads, punks, new-age travellers or hoodies to name but a few from the time-line.

If you re thinking about what epitomises social evil for you, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation want to know about your thoughts. They have a very simple response form which they’d really like you to complete, anonymously . It’ll be interesting to see how they analyse the results! See www.socialevils.org.uk/

If you want to be a bit less anonymous, you can always copy your response as a reply to this post and let off a bit of steam about what you thin are social evils in the UK today.

A campaign launches in the UK today which encourages school leavers, and particularly their parents, to think about alternatives to the “automatic” choice of a university degree course.

The campaign by the Edge Foundation suggests that whilst university may well be the best option for many young people, others may be better advised to get into the workplace and start developing their careers at age 18.

“Our campaign is encouraging parents to stop and reassess their own prejudices, listen to what interests their children and discuss all their options with them,” said Andy Powell, the chief executive of Edge, ”

It is certainly a campaign that resonates with me.

The Edge Foundation is funded by the proceeds of the sale of the awarding body Edexcel to Pearson plc a few of years ago. After the sale, the Edexcel Fondation was formed to campaign for greater recognition of the part that vocational education can play. The foundation changed its name to The Edge in 2004.

There’s a story in today’s Guardian along with a link to the TV ad that is also launching today.

I had my first experience of a flash-mob last night. My daughter had received a forwarded text message (SMS) advising that a bunch of people might well be meeting up on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral in London for a short dance party at precisely 6.46pm.

I tagged along and arriving a few minutes early noticed that there was an increasing number of people standing and strolling around, just like people do – tourists, office workers, etc. Quite a few had iPods plugged into their ears. Again, this is totally normal.

More people kept arriving. At a few seconds to 6.46, a countdown was started then, at zero, almost everyone turned up their music and started dancing (OK, we did too). A great and enthusiastic time was had by all then 30 minutes later the party dissolved again.

A few tourists were left looking rather bemused by the best part of 1000 people dancing to the apparent silence.

What particularly interests me is the mashup of social networking going on here:

• the mix of electronic viral connections through the phones, Skype, MySpace, sites such as www.dontstayin.com and word of mouth,
• the fact that real people actually came together in one location for a communal activity (and the synchronisation of the start was an important element),
• the almost complete lack of direct face-to-face communication (everyone having ear-buds jammed in their heads),
• the fact that everyone was dancing, as much “together” as they would be in a club, but to their own chosen tune,
• the way that the mob evaporated away at the end
• by 11 today (16 hours later) there are 773 pictures of the event at: http://www.dontstayin.com/uk/london/st-pauls-cathedral/2007/jul/19/event-131750

I wonder what parallels and lessons it holds for us about how we might engage people in collaborative learning and how we connect with each other in the 21st century.

In “Patterns and sense-making: information visualisation”, George Siemens proposes a variety of strategies to create visual representations of data to help us, essentially, get our heads around the big picture by spotting relationships, trends and connections before getting into the finer and statistical details.

It isn’t about oversimplifying complex issues, it is about giving the issues some colour and shape before delving.

He also went on the show a list of potential benefits from thinking about and applying appropriate filters to how we approach data. Here he reintroduced the vital concepts of networks, distributed knowledge and connectivism citing benefits (I’ve put my comments in parenthesis):
- Network models of learning are adaptive (because networks are inherently dynamic)
- Ecologies must be diverse and enabling (or we’re heading back to a model where we teach as we were taught not how different people might learn)
- Today’s information is tomorrow’s sense-making (I love this one. It brings to mind that when we ask for information there’s a moment when we realise that we’ve got an awful lot of stuff to make sense of before we can make use of it).
- Sane, digital life (in other words, not trying to take a drink of water from the fire hose)
- Complex, integrated understanding (again reinforcing the point that complexity is an integral part of understanding)
- Multi-faceted
- Multi-ontology

You can see a recording of the whole <i>Patterns and sense-making: Information visualisation</i> session at: http://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/event/playback

From a straw poll of institutions with which we work it would appear that only a minority of “teachers” make any significant use of the “read-only” Internet to carry out the basic functions of “looking stuff up”.
It will be surprise that a tiny percentage are engaging with the rapidly evolving tools of the read/write web, sometimes called web 2.0, through the use of tools such as Moodle which encourage connections, discussion and collaboration between users through discussion forums and real-time “chat” facilities.
To stick with Moodle for a moment, the rate of evolution and development of this open-source tool has been amazingly rapid and since last year, when the UK’s Open University adopted the platform for much of it’s on-line learning provision it has been roaring ahead. Indeed the OU has recently made a lot of courses available for free through its Learning Space initiative Take-up in schools, colleges and work-baed learning has, predictably enough, been patchy with the most extensive application coming through committed individuals who are prepared to put a good deal of unpaid time into proving the case.
Now, the virtual world of the 3D web is emerging and again, educators around the world are seeing the potential for rich immersive learning experiences in virtual environments such as Second Life. Already over 100 real-world universities (including Harvard) have built campuses in Second Life.
My concern with much of what has been happening thus far in Second Life is simply the replication of classrooms rather than the creation of really rich learning environments, with convincing simulations, etc. I can see that classrooms might well give a useful first stage bridge between the real and virtual worlds and makes fairly traditional learning available to anyone with a fairly new computer and fast internet access. And yes, there are a whole load of issues about access and the growing divide between those with and without such access in there.
Vicki Davis posted this really enlightening overview of where we are and where we may well find ourselves going.
It really is worth a read and includes some enlightening videos.
My conclusion is that as virtual as the worlds of Moodle chat and Second Life may be, the learning that happens there is as real as any other learning and there are significant benefits in terms of access, engagement and social interaction which make for compelling learning experiences.

Roger Schrank takes a look at what and why we are teaching and concludes that we may have come up with the wrong solution to the wrong problem. OK, it’s written from a US perspective (fair enough, that’s where he is) but I think the issues he raises might have relevance for all of us, wherever we are.
Take a look at the link here. It’s only a two minute read but it might well give you an hour or so of thought!
Wrong problem, wrong solution.

I stumbled across this clip from George Clooney’s film “Good night and good luck” on YouTube. In this speech Ed Murrow was talking about television but it has uncanny relevance to today in regard to the internet and international politics. It’s quite chilling when you think about it.

The Blackboard learning management system is looking decidedly uncomfortable after the pounding it has taken from large parts of the on-line learning sector over the past few days.
Trouble started when Blackboard sought, and was awarded, a US patent apparently covering most of what is widely known as an LMS (Learning Management System). Lots of institutions, companies and open source applications have developed various LMS solutions over the last several years, so you can understand them feeling a bit put-out.
Blackboard immediately filed a suit against a Canadian LMS company called Desire 2 Learn.
Stephen Downs has a dedicated tread for this topic at his excellent blog OL Daily see: http://www.downes.ca/blackboard_patent.htm