A Tale of Willy Wobble

No, I'm not being rude. I'm at a conference for a couple of days and the delegates in the first session of the day were shown a film of a one-year-old baby who had learned to swipe her finger over her father's i-Phone to cause a progression of photographs to appear. This is how youngsters these days are brought up to have no fear of new technology and to interact with it from as soon as - no let's make that before - they can walk. Someone else suggested in a session that it may be taken as proof that the human brain now learns in different ways from the way human brains learned in those dark dark days before computers. I disagreed.

In a room full of strategic managers from colleges and the great and glorious from government funded support agencies I told them about the rattle toy I had as a baby that was called Willy Wobble... I kid you not. I pointed out that as a child with a rattle stuck by a suction cup to the tray of my high chair I learned that :

(1) by striking it sideways it made a noise that I found pleasing

(2) that it didn't hurt, and

(3) if I did it enough my Mum got annoyed at the row and removed it.

Therefore I learned to draw a balance between how often and how violently I wanted to make it rattle and how little I needed to do it in order to keep the use of it. This caused much hilarity in the room...

Since then people have come up to say how much they enjoyed my input.

How do we learn then? Well I think we learn from absolutely everything we do. We learn from experimenting, we learn from playing, we learn from people telling us stories; whether in person or from books or now from a web browser.

If anything has changed in the short time that computers have existed it is not the human brain because I don't believe that evolution is as rapid as all that. I think it is more in the way that opportunities are presented to us or kept from us and the ways in which, having tried something new, we enjoy it, or appreciate it. That can be a good or bad thing.

In the far-away past before books, we were told "facts" by people in authority over us - the Church, quite often. We didn't know enough to challenge them. When handwritten books came about, they were mostly religious and created in scriptoriums and had to be read to us by people with that skill, who could put whatever spin they wanted upon the contents. Then when printed books and education in reading became the norm, it was still quite a job to be published and you had to jump through a number of hoops so in the main text books were written by people who were well informed and other people checked and edited content before publication.

Now we can all be publishers because of the wonderful world of blogs. It's easy to learn what we like and therefore we look for more. But it's sometimes less easy to know what's truth or what's accurate and what's twaddle or even deliberate misinformation.

I need to get back to another session now though other stuff is bubbling in my mind. More later perhaps, but for now - thanks for reading my twaddle...

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Learning Spaces

Yesterday I was at New College Durham at a joint LSC / JISC infoNet / CEL event: Leading a New College Build.

New College Durham have completed a project which included replacing their old campus with a brand new one on the same site whilst remaining open to students, a project that caused a few challenges but which has come to an excellent conclusion.

The day included a tour of the New College campus (including the music recording studios that made my mouth water!) and the design and layout is stunning.

Not designed merely to be attractive to look at, the college took stock of how it expected learning and teaching to develop over the lifetime of the new buildings. Things are moving so fast currently, especially within the ever-developing world of new technology, that this is an almost impossible task but the design incorporated lots of innovative ideas and technologies.

Learning is much more interactive than it used to be. Whilst yesterday's students were used to lecturing staff imparting knowledge, today's students want a say in how they learn. They discuss things in groups much more and a lot of learning comes from more informal social interaction than it used to. Colleges are now incorporating lots of social spaces into their design, with comfortable seating and a mix (once seen as risky in the extreme) of refreshment outlets and IT equipment!

The staff at Durham were extremely open and honest about the challenges of their building project and the delegates of college estates and facilities directors and other senior managers were enthusiastic about what they had seen and heard.

My own organisation, JISC infoNet has a large resource for colleges and universities involved with Planning and Designing Technology-Rich Learning Spaces backed up by our core resources or infoKits on such things as Project Management, Risk Management Change Management and more.

Photograph by kind permission of New College Durham.

AoC NILTA Conference 2007

I'm currently at the AoC NILTA Conference in Leeds and it has been an excellent conference this year. This has been the 19th NILTA Conference if you count the "parent" organisations of NILTA, namely NAITFE, the National CMIS Board and SCITFE the first incarnation of all.

One or two people present have been at all 19 of them. I can't quite claim that, I started out in 1993 as Associate Chair of the National CMIS Board so have been to enough for people to look at me with concern, wondering whether I'll collapse with age... or perhaps waiting for me to grow up - no chance of that I'm afraid! Lots of people yesterday were saying nice things about me to my boss, some without realising who she was, so my thanks to them!

Some good and pertinent sessions and keynote speakers. I especially liked a couple of phrases by Barbara Ganley from Middlebury College in America who was speaking about the use of blogs by her creative writing students. She spoke about "learning in cycles of disruption and repair" and the need for building into your courses some opportunities to fail, so that learning can come from it. Initially this might sound strange - we want students to fail? Well not in the long run of course, we want them to achieve their qualification, but walking away with a certificate is not the only goal I hope. It's when we fail in something that we take a step backwards, assess things like what went wrong and why, learn to identify and solve problems and learn what is repeatable and what should not be repeated.

The second keynote was from Nigel Paine who gave a very enjoyable and thought provoking session. He focussed on Change and the rate of change and the slowness of many educational cultures in dealing and accepting change and embedding new ways of learning. "We have got to let things from the past go," he said - a phrase that might challenge a few cultures perhaps. The tendency can be to evolve slowly, adding and supplementing but without always reviewing, releasing and discarding those things which have become tired, outdated or no longer relevant to today's young people in Further Education.

JISC infoNet, my own organisation, is currently involved with a series of one-day workshops on Change Management, delivered by myself with Clive Alderson, which introduce strategy and techniques for supporting Change in organisations. Another of our resources which has been generating lots of interest is the Planning & Designing Technology-Rich Learning Spaces infoKit. With many colleges currently involved in new building projects or refurbishment, the kit, released last week is timely and contains many resources, including a database of images of college and university innovative building projects, hosted at Flickr.

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