I was going to call this piece 'Teachers' - Gatekeepers or Keyholders?' the role of the teacher is critical in fostering learning and we all have had experiences of good and bad teachers in our school lives.

Some years ago I did some work for local schools to create a single sign-on system to allow schools to access a wide range of free and purchased e-learning content from a number of different suppliers.


The idea was to provide access to a wide range of learning resources for use at home and and at school which was always available. Interestingly some of the materials that schools bought were provided as content services covering a number of subjects.

Some months into the project I did some surveys of how the service was being used by speaking to students and teachers in some of our High schools. Pupils reported that they found some of the materials very helpful in clarifying or explaining things they had covered in class. Others said that they were able to look up other things they were interested in. Teachers were far less enthusiastic. Some said they hadn't promoted the content related to their subject as they didn't like it or it didn't explain topics in they way they wanted things explained. More worrying was the comment that they didn't want content made available for topics coming up in the future as it may 'spoil their lessons'!

What were were attempting to do was tap into the huge resource that is out on the net to support learning drawing on as many services as possible to increase the range and type of material available to young people.

The system we put together was based on the Shibboleth authentication and it worked very well - we ended up with more than 40 commercial services and some free content linked into the system but our real goal was to tap into the growing number of learning repositories around the world. Much of the work being done is focussed on university level students but a number of repositories also explore and index content for school age children.

One of the first we looked at was the Merlot repository which contains a large number of peer reviews materials including simulations, presentations, text materials and apps for mobile devices. Merlot allows integration with other search systems and the aim was to develop the search side of the system to allow pupils and teachers to access the materials they needed to support their learning or to use in their teaching. The potential is huge and the number of repositories has grown over the years, some specifically aimed at the younger students. A visit to any one of these repositories is well worth it - spend a little while there rather than dipping in - go to iTunes U and take a look at the awesome materials that are available there - again well worth an hour or two of your time.

So why is it that we are not all accessing learning where and when we need it? - why is it that these fabulous materials are not used across the world to support teaching and learning on a daily basis? How come that when you speak to almost any teacher they have never heard of them?

There are probably too many reasons to list but for me the main ones are:

1. Teachers are fixed in the way they work and teach - many do innovate but the critical mass of innovators in any particular school to change to way we learn and teach has not been reached. If something takes a bit more effort to do than their existing ways of doing things it tends not to be adopted.

2. Content is still difficult to locate and it means that teachers have to search for just the resource they regard as 'valuable' before they build it into their teaching. There is no common standard for indexing materials so you have to navigate each repository rather than being able aggregate many of them and carry out a single search.

3. Authentication into some of these services is not easy to automate so you end up registering with multiple sites and that involved too much fiddling about to get at the resources you need

4. Peer review is powerful, in that it establishes a 'value' placed on the resource by other practitioners. Trouble is there is no standard and no real match between the teaching you may do as a teacher and the reviewers

There are others but the potential is huge and the quality and range of resources is impressive and all given away free by educators. Once we have cracked the indexing, searching and access issues, the opportunities for personalised and independent learning would expand rapidly. Teachers would have access to a wealth of materials to promote the learning of their subject and students would have control of their learning. Institutions and formal learning would still be a key component of education systems around the world - I'm not a de-schooler, but the focus could become more individualised and to a degree paced for each learner.

It may be a vision for the future we never achieve but having a direction of travel is important and there are many that share the vision and are working hard to achieve it.

In the UK we have spent a lot of money over the years creating a high speed infrastructure for schools. Many schools have fast internet connections but I wonder just how many of them are working to establish what might be called an infrastructure for learning. What does this mean?....

There is much discussion about Transforming Education but what does this mean and how can you transform something that in many countries is driven by achieving specific outcomes. We all know that we need our schools to deliver citizens ready for work in the 21st Century but what does that actually mean when the measures we have for success are largely the ones that we have used for hundreds of years.

Alan November is well known in countries around the world for his work on Information Literacy. His book 'Empowering Students with Technology' is an essential read for anyone trying to harness the use of the net to support learning.

Alan has also been in a position to visit a number of the most innovative schools in the US and elsewhere and in his usual candid way is well able to set out his opinions about everything from e-safety to school and curriculum design.

After the BLCO7 conference in Boston this year I asked Alan to take part in a discussion about the future of learning via Skype.

We discussed a number of issues as always Alan brings his experience to bear on the issues and provides insightful comments on the challenges that are ahead.

The development of tools for social interaction and which foster collaboration and membership of online communities has exploded in recent years. Myspace, Flickr, Bebo etc are all sites which draw people in, share their identities and interests and then share in all sorts of ways (some not quite legal).

There are tensions in the educational world regarding such technologies. Leading advocates like Steven Downes would claim that Web 2.0 will provide massive opportunities for learning but absolutely not in the traditional school or even a school at all. Others say it is the way forward and it has a significant contribution to make to, what you might call, more formal education.

The term Learning 2.0 was coined (I guess) by those advocates of Web 2 technologies to claim the educational ground and to promote their vision of the way the future of learning should go. Learning 2.0 is really what Wikipedia would refer to as e-learning 2.0 i.e. the second generation of e-learning tools based around collaborative tools such as wikis and blogs etc.

Most innovations in learning and which have an ICT component have come and gone - remember the CD ROM? We have been through a whole raft of software and hardware systems which we have put into schools. In most cases the ones that stick are those that seem best to fit the traditional mode of teaching and learning e.g. Learning Platforms as course delivery systems or whiteboards which look a lot more interesting that black ones but still hang on a wall at one end of a room and have everyone looking at it!

The same fate may lie in wait for Web 2.0 and e-learning 2.0 if we try to fit it into the standard school setting other than to be used by a few interested people with a passion for exploring at the edges of what we still refer to as schooling.

Alan November was asked a question about the relationship between web 2 and learning 2 at a recent conference - although the audio is poor his comments are pretty realistic.

What society wants from the education system is changing all the time although for many it still appears to provide more or less the same diet as we have seen for the past hundred years or so.

We are in a connected world and there are resources for learning in all sorts of formats along with the opportunity to communicate and collaborate with individuals and groups from around the world. Never before has there been something that had such an impact on the education process as has the advance in technology and the internet. We need to think carefully about how the use of technology will affect the design and delivery of the curriculum in our schools.


The question is how much will the curriculum be allowed to change? How much can we accommodate these new ways or working and how ready are our pedagogues to accomodate the use of technology to allow the changes to take root?

Some would suggest that nothing much will change. The subjects we are used to have been around for ages. Others argue that young people now have more choice than they have ever had and that the social networks and other communities online will be the future for formal education.

Most probably we will end up somewhere between the two extremes. We will probably have schools for a long time to come, they will have teachers (but perhaps fewer specialists), we will have more adults working with kids (teaching assistants and mentors from outside the school etc), we will have online spaces (but these may be simply extensions of a particular classroom and not dynamic communities). We are already seeing a mix of provision with some internships or work placements as part of the learner's programme and we are seeing ideas for building the curriculum to deliver the standards that seem to be a political imperative and yet have been formed into a more project based structures.

The nature of educational change is that it is normally a slow process. That said the rapid development of alternatives as technological provides interesting and attractive alternatives will result in huge pressure to speed the change process. We await with interest the results.

Ask a student where they get most of the support for their school coursework and you might expect them to say their teachers.

489 students responded to a poll in our online learner community and they produced some interesting results.





Q. Where do you get most of your information to support your coursework?

School Intranet 1.23% (6 votes)
The Internet (Via Google etc) 51.12% (250 votes)
Teachers during lessons 37.83% (185 votes)
Online Learning Space 2.86% (14 votes)
Other Students 6.95% (34 votes)
Total number of votes: 489

The results pose some interesting questions. Should we be pleased that so many are using the web or should we be concerned that so many are turning to the web rather than their teachers? There are a number of possible reactions to this sort of information. Firstly are we actually preparing learners for the effective use of the web or do they simply decide that they can find most things they need from this source?

How many courses in schools actually teach the efficient use of the web and effective searching and citation. Many teachers say that a large number of students tend to produce the same sort of information when using the web for coursework and in some cases the teachers can actually tell which web sites students have used. Is this a good or bad thing? Are there skills that learners need to be taught and are our teachers knowledgable to teach those skills?

Loads of questions but very few answers. We are only beginning to unpick the implications of all this for education and the approriate curriculum for the 21 century learner - interesting to speculate where it is all going.

Curriculum change is something that education has been dealing with for hundreds of years and the history of education is littered with theories, ideas, claims and even legislation.

Talking to educators during a recent visit to the USA and discussing the failure of the UK education system to remain meaningful to a growing number of learners would suggest that change is in the air across the western world. What was regarded as the skills and aptitudes needed for the industrial age and more recently the information age seem to be under detailed scrutiny in a number of countries.

In the UK the debate has been accelerating in pace for some time, with efforts to develop a more personalised approach to learning and the consequences that result from tailoring the curriculum to more individual need.

The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce) Opening Minds initiative set out to encourage the introduction of systemic change within the UK national curriculum and proposed a new competence-based curriculum. It seeks to re balance the information based national curriculum and draw in those competencies that are necessary for the 21st Century. The competencies are:

• Competences for Learning
• Competences for Citizenship
• Competences for Relating to People
• Competences for Managing Situations
• Competences for Managing Information

The initiative is being taken up by a growing number of schools in the UK - keeping one eye on the pressure on them to maintain their examination status in league tables but recognising the need for changes which meet the needs of the learners in their care.

In July 2007 the national awarding body QCA made the announced of changes to the formal secondary curriculum to reduce the prescription that existed previously to allow teachers and schools the freedom to innovate. Opening Minds, changes to the statutory curriculum and other programmes for curriculum innovation are clear indicators that we are in a continually changing curriculum landscape - exciting times.

This e-book explores Learning Spaces from the perspective of effective learning and how learner expectations may influence their development.

It also covers the roll of learning technologies in bringing together different groups of people and specialisms all of whom can impact on the learner and the learning that takes place. While the e-book looks at learning spaces other than Primary and high schools a lot of the basic ideas apply and the discussion surrounding the desire to create more flexible spaces, both the physical and virtual ones, is of real value.

There is useful debate about formal and informal physical spaces and the importance of striking the correct balance to create the 'correct' environments for learning. The book opens up the debate about the role of technology as part of the mix and suggests that while learners are have more access to technology and they are comfortable using it many are still not proficient. This presents real issues for those schools and other educational organisations that see e-learning as a key component of personalisation.

The many VLE type products out there may provide alternative routes but the assumption that students can use them straight off and value the experience is open to question. The book also explores the issues surrounding the notion of community and identifies some of the ways in which a well designed virtual learning space can contribute to the development of an effective learning environment. The full e-book (173kb) can be accessed on the main site which also contains a number of case studies and the book broken down by chapters.