Digital Transformation Projects

This chapter looks at Ambient Learning City, the fullest implementation of the Emergent Learning Model because it looked at learning “beyond the classroom”; WikiQuals; JISC Digital projects in FE; as well as the work of several others, especially Thom Cochrane and Vijaya Khanu Bote, who have taken the core concepts of learner-generated contexts and applied them in university and primary school settings, extending our work beyond the UK post-compulsory context. A key dimension of the open context model of learning was the PAH Continuum, which showed how the heutagogic practice of enabling learner agency could be embedded in any educational institution. Each year on 23rd September, World Heutagogy Day pulls together emerging practice on a range of themes, which continue to inform work, such as creativity, resources, environment, teaching and digital learning. The authors also look at third places as change agents of learning as in the Erasmus Plus project “The Origin of Spaces”. Overall, this chapter provides a range of examples of the kind of transformation of education that digital projects can enable and exemplify.

Afterword

This chapter looks across the landscape of learning in the current age of algorithms and so-called ‘artificial intelligence' with a focus on issues raised in the concept of “the master algorithm” around learning models and the future of learning. Pedro Domingos identifies five “scientific” theories of learning algorithms and presents them sequentially and so capable of improvement by the theorist (and he alone). By contrast, in her conversational framework, Diana Laurillard presents four approaches to framing learning models. The authors prefer Laurillard's modelling but believe the fifth dimension of rhizomatic learning needs to be added to her framework in order to enable the learner to take the final decisions on what has been learned and what they will do subsequently, and so produce a learner-centric framework for learning and architectures of participation. They examine several histories of thinking about intelligence as well as long-term views of technology before outlining, briefly, a phenomenonology of learning as the potential countervailing ideas to AI in education.

Building Digital Learning Architectures of Participation

This summative chapter outlines how practitioners, learners, managers, and various participants in education and policy might help build learning infrastructures. The authors try to identify who can lead on these processes and how they might do so. They hope to show what a transformed learner-centric education system could look like after consideration of the possibilities they have presented here. Technology has its greatest impact when its use is appropriate to context. Technology projects divorced from their organisational and community contexts solve technical problems and create unintended consequences for the wider organisation and their intended users, and architectures of participation are a means of dealing with such issues.

The Digital Practitioner

Whereas EMFFE was a group of wise men and women reviewing possibilities in the use of extant learning technologies and then designing developmental frameworks to scaffold these possibilities, digital practitioner revealed already existing, transformational digital practice from a bottom-up perspective. Where national education policy is about providing standardised “solutions” to what the future looks like (i.e., around centralised learning management systems), “The Digital Practitioner” survey discovered changing practice on the ground and provided new concepts for describing this work. The critical discovery was that of the use of “personal” technologies (rather than business or “learning” technologies) driving change in learning. The digital practitioner emerges as a craft professional who uses their personal curiosity to redesign learning delivery. This is best described as co-creating artfully crafted, student-centred, learning experiences. This chapter describes the digital craft professional of the future, nascent now.

Before and After MOOCs, Before and After Institutions

Digital learning practice using ubiquitous personal technologies can lead to teachers using their craft professionalism to create artfully-crafted, student-centered, learning experiences. Supportive and progressive organisational architectures of participation reveal adaptive institutions working across collaborative networks. The question now is what might adaptive institutions look like if they have been subjected to transformational processes, rather than just “e-enabling” the traditional practice of content delivery within the existing classical subject taxonomies? MOOCs seem to be a continuation of a learning catered for content through delivery; they are not a new paradigm, despite their promotion in this way by universities and the technology companies selling their platforms. In order to look at what transformation rather than e-enabling might look like, the authors review their framing ideas with long-run historical views of education, learning, knowledge, and institutions with a process called “before and after.”

The EMFFE Project

This chapter looks at where this ambition started with the national UK project called the E-Maturity Framework for Further Education (EMFFE). This project ran for 18 months with a brief to design an e-learning ready institutional model that UK, English, Further Education Colleges and other providers of post-compulsory education could adopt, both individually and as a sector working as adaptive institutions across collaborative networks. This chapter examines in detail the elements that make up this development framework for vocational colleges and post-compulsory education providers (provided in full in the Appendix) from which the authors developed the idea of organizational architectures of participation, which drives this book.

The Organisational Architecture of Participation

This chapter starts with Tim O'Reilly, but some of the tensions in the authors' use of his Web 2.0 meme map will pull the reader away from O'Reilly's business focus into their world of communities of engagement and learner autonomy. O'Reilly focuses on the commercial possibilities of Web 2.0 in his work, whereas the authors' interest is focused on a much wider concern with ideas such as Lave and Wenger's “communities of practice” and their later work on ways of using technology in online communities, especially the role of “technology steward,” helping those communities to make good use of technology for their social and educational purposes. An organisational architecture of participation is described as being “adaptive institutions working across collaborative networks.”

Learner-Modelling

This chapter focuses on the Open Context Model of Learning, namely that of a Community Development Model of Learning. However, this sector-based model of learning emerged from research carried out in 2002 into how people learned in UK online centres, which were the first wholly digital learning environments, developed in the UK. This chapter goes beyond examining digitally enabled learning within a single context by asking, “How do people learn?” especially as the original research had started with the question “How do people learn in UK online centres?” The chapter also asks, “How do we model learning?” The education system itself has never “modelled learning” it offers content-based courses. The design of large-scale computerisation technology projects has been based on a systems analysis approach that includes the concept of “user-modelling.” The chapter shows how this can be done from the research conceptualisation of these processes from three perspectives: 1) learner (interest-driven learning), 2) learning location (lifecycles), 3) large-scale (context-responsive) system.

The Open Context Model of Learning

Various digital technologies, the internet, the web, information appliances, smart phones, and particularly, Web 2.0 enable us to review and interrogate how technologies, business, social, personal, and learning technologies can help reconfigure the organisational infrastructure of learning to better align with how human beings learn about the world around us and ourselves. Hazel Henderson said, “Technology is the essence of politics,” but perhaps “Technology is the essence of education,” which for 1000 years has been based on a content-scarcity model of resources and focused on a content-delivery model of learning to an elite who will benefit from access to these scarce resources, themselves based on a subject-based taxonomy that took root in the 19th century and has dominated the design of 20th and 21st century educational institutions. The Open Context Model of Learning argues that we need new models of teaching and learning (obuchenie) built around the PAH continuum of pedagogy, andragogy, and heutagogy and an underpinning belief in the co-creation of learning and education between “teachers” and “learners.”

The Emergent Learning Model

This chapter synthesises the earlier work on modelling learning and tries to create a design toolkit for anyone who wants to design for learning. However, the conceptual starting point for this chapter is the desire expressed in the EU Bologna Process to integrate “informal,” “non-formal,” and “formal” learning. The authors believe that the process the EU carried out, which led to the Horizon 2020 funding programme, was mistaken. The critical dimension of this lies in whether one examines these three dimensions of learning by starting with the existing formal structures of education or if one starts with the largely unexamined processes of learning. Education assumes that learning is an automatic by-product, an epiphenomenon, of the education system and so does not need to be defined separately. As has been seen in the chapters based on an ethnographic study of learning in digital environments and on learner-modelling (Chapters 1 and 2), learning has not been sufficiently discussed or described in much academic literature focused on education.