a g i l e l e a r n i n g

Unplugged!

Conversations about Learning

Featuring interviews with

Dougald Hine Annie Weekes David Jennings Tony Hall Fred Garnett Ollie Nørsterud Gardener
Co-founder of the School Home educator Consultant in online Photographer, learning London Knowledge Lab & Enterprise learning
of Everything Page 6 learning and discovery evangelist and reluctant Learner-Generated entrepreneur
Page 3 Page 4 teacher Contexts Research Group Page 9
Page 5 Page 10
PLUS
David Gauntlett Dick Moore

Professor of Media & Communications, author of Making is Connecting Consultant & former Director of Technology, Ufi/learndirect
Page 7 Page 8

January 2011

Improvisation
and
imagination
The interviews in this newspaper were
conducted by David Jennings and
originally published on his blog
between June and December 2010 —
see http://is.gd/jTr06 for the full online
versions.
When I did the first of these inter-
views, I didn’t see it becoming part
of a newspaper. The journey from
here to there has been a story not
so much of Eureka moments but of
a gradual series of small, impro-
vised steps. Producing the news-
paper has been just one more of
those steps, a staging point to help
reflect on the direction of travel
and decide where to go next.
I’m incredibly grateful to the
interviewees for their time and in-
sights, and especially to the mem-
bers of the School of Everything’s
‘Unplugged’ group who have fur-
ther distilled the original versions
and helped present them in an al-
ternative format that makes new
connections and strengthens grow-
ing ones.
2
Agile Learning: Unplugged issue, 2011
The rough plan I originally
sketched for seeding a ‘lightweight
learning’ community of practice
included a fancy Semantic Me-
diaWiki implementation rather
than a newspaper. But let’s wind
back a little bit further still.
In 2009, my friend and regular
associate Seb Schmoller suggested
we start to think about what we
should do in the event that the cli-
ents for our consulting work —
predominantly public sector edu-
cation organisations — were to
have their budgets savagely cut or
abolished. The first instinct, rather
than to rethink our own business
model, was to treat this budg-
etlessness as just another problem
for which we could provide solu-
tions. Hmmm.
So began an effort to research
what had hitherto been an unex-
amined intuition: that a lot of
learning technology developments
were throwing money at heavy-
weight infrastructure and over-
complicated content-development
that did more to constrain learning
than to liberate it. When money is
tight, we reasoned, much can still
be done using what’s available on-
Representation,
Reflection,
Relationships
A new three Rs for education?
line for relatively little or no cost:
• collaboration environments,
from build-your-own social
networks to wikis and even
old-fashioned email lists, and
• free learning resources, from
Khan Academy and iTunes U to
the Open University’s Open-
Learn initiative and what’s
available on the open web.
Using lightweight, low-cost
tools, we felt, should also free up
organisations and groups to proto-
type and experiment with alterna-
tive approaches — and also put
learners more genuinely in control
of their own learning, tapping into
their deeper motivations at the
same time as giving them scope to
be more playful and creative.
There’s no unique insight here,
and many have been making these
points for years. The interviews
highlights ideas and experiences
with roots going back several dec-
ades.
But usable examples and guid-
ance in areas such as adult, work-
based learning (where I do much
of my work) are still hard to find.
There’s a sense that many are com-
ing to similar conclusions from dif-
ferent starting points. Sometimes
they’ve put a name and a dis-
course to what they’re doing —
like ‘Edupunk’ in US higher edu-
cation — while others are just feel-
ing their way towards solutions to
their immediate problems.
Many are coming to simi-
lar conclusions from dif-
ferent starting points…
these actions are starting
to knit together
We’re at a moment where these
actions are starting to knit to-
gether. I decided to interview some
people who were doing interesting
things in disparate areas, as my
contribution to doing the knitting.
Dick Moore was my first inter-
viewee. At that stage, I expected
most of the interviews to focus on
the combination of methods and
technologies that Dick talks about.
The last of the interviews, with Ol-
lie Nørsterud Gardener, returns to
similar territory, but along the way
I relearned that lesson that we all
pay lipservice to, but too often for-
get in practice: it’s not about the
technology.
 Knitting people and ideas to-
gether takes time. It’s all about re-
lationships. At around the same
time that Seb Schmoller and I be-
gan our discussions, I started at-
tending the Unplugged meetups in
the Royal Festival Hall. Those two
strands and the series of inter-
views in this paper gradually
twined together. Dougald Hine
and Tony Hall are founder mem-
bers of the meetups. David Gaunt-
lett was first a guest and then a
member, while Fred Garnett has
become a member and Ollie Gar-
dener an overseas visitor since I
interviewed each of them. So, for
me anyway, these interviews are
short clips from a broader, more
far-reaching conversation.
Context and
conversation
Fred Garnett gives an overview of this
series of interviews and what they say
about the state of learning.
Prescience, collapse and reflection
This newspaper presents some
conversations about learning
which promote the generic idea of
being agile in the face of new con-
straints. The origins for these re-
flections lie within David Jen-
nings’s and Seb Schmoller’s earlier
discussions about the impact of
austerity on learning provision,
whilst, back in 2006, Dougald Hine
and Paul Miller were wondering
what might become useful after a
major global economic crisis.
Out of these concerns the School
of Everything emerged and then
School of Everything Unplugged
allowed the conversations in this
paper to occur.
Some of the original thoughts,
rooted in creating new ways of us-
ing technology, were that light-
weight tools might enable an agile
approach to learning to emerge; an
iterative learning process linking
learners to their goals dynamically.
Agile might also allow a scaling-
down of learning to match the
human experience rather than the
scaling up of institutions attempt-
ing to engage with financial oppor-
tunities that globalisation seemed
to offer.
Small pieces loosely joined
Dick Moore takes his under-
standing of the Agile Learning
process from the Agile Manifesto
(2001), focusing on the notion of
‘the ability to change specific
learning goals as issues arise’.
However, whilst he values agile as
a contextualising process based on
Agile Learning: Unplugged issue, 2011
3
what he calls ‘agile core skills’ and institutions as she doesn’t believe Overall Agile Learning provides
iterative learning, he is cautious you can ‘develop’ employees, they a deconstruction of education into
about whether agile actually need to understand their needs its miscellaneous parts, such that it
brings about deep learning. and drive their own learning. offers the possibility that learners
David Jennings takes this view could re-aggregate the relevant
Agile: the basket case for learning
of agile core skills deeper by look- small pieces to meet their self-
ing at how we might change the So Agile Learning might best be identified learning goals or inter-
relationship with the authority of seen as a basket of techniques, ests. At the present time, one of so-
the teacher, offering a vision of tools, processes and attitudes — all cial and economic collapse, Agile
learners contracting in to learning, of which are discussed here — offers fresh ways of thinking about
using the basket of techniques that which, when used responsibly and learning that might enable new
Agile might offer to self-organise sensitively, might enable better and socially useful modes of learn-
their learning. self-organisation of learning. ing to emerge.
Agile seems to offer a ‘small
pieces loosely joined approach’,
exemplified by David Gauntlett,
who is a serious advocate of the
convivial use of Lego as part of his
Making is Connecting work. David
is concerned to create a social
process of learning that promotes
active engagement with the envi-
ronment and he uses tools to en-
able collaborative learning to oc-
cur. He also sees consequences be-
yond the classroom, by engaging
with the Transition Towns move-
ment, for example.
Fred Garnett focuses on how
that ability to craft learning col-
laboratively requires a set of bro-
kering skills in teachers, which are
not commonly part of their profes-
sional skillset. He sees this as part
of their responsibility to enable
learners to generate their own con-
texts for learning.
School? That’s a weird idea!
Tony Hall, on the other hand,
doesn’t see teaching as a craft; he
sees craft as learning. Tony is in-
terested in how you enable learn-
ing in extra-institutional contexts
through conversations around
people’s interests. As Tony is a
photographer, he works with peo-
and getting very into Illich gener-
ple’s pictures. He is interested in
the person who takes the picture,
To learn, ally. I’d met Paul Miller (now
and the image is a way into con- to teach School of Everything CEO), who
had heard of Illich via his work on
versations about their reality.
Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society Dougald Hine brought a wide range of a pamphlet called the Pro-Am
ideas are another thread running interests and experiences to his role as Revolution.
through these Agile conversations, co-founder of the School of There was a sense that a number
reaching an apotheosis with home- Everything, an internet startup of us were rediscovering these
educators Annie and Guy who launched in 2008 with the aim of older ideas about the possibility
don’t distinguish between learning connecting people who can teach to and the desirability of meeting
and not-learning. They see that people who want to learn. more of our needs outside of pre-
learning is always improvised scriptive institutions.
In 2009, Dougald and Tony Hall
around interests as they occur at Paul and I and the other School
started the series of weekly meetings
any time of day; so much so that of Everything founders originally
about learning from which a few of
Annie now thinks that it is school crossed paths through our in-
these interviews grew. And this
that seem like a weird idea. volvement in a weekly email
discussion took place in our usual spot
Ollie Nørsterud Gardener has newsletter called Pick Me Up.
looking out over the River Thames
applied social networking tools to Pick Me Up was a recipe for fun.
from the Royal Festival Hall.
project and knowledge manage- To write a story for it, you had to
ment within organisations to try to be actively involved in making
enable organisational learning, es- David Jennings: What ambitions something happen. You told the
pecially peer-to-peer learning as did you have in creating School story of what you’d done in a way
part of using her company’s Nod- of Everything? that might encourage others to use
dlePod service. Ollie is applying Dougald Hine : I’d been reading what you had shared to help them
emergent learning techniques to Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society do something.
 That’s how we stumbled into
this idea that it was more fun to
use the internet to make stuff hap-
pen in the real world than to spend
more and more of your life in front
of a screen.
In 2004, people were still think-
ing about the internet as some-
thing which virtualised more and
more areas of our lives. So the
internet changed the world by
enabling you to shop and bank on-
line, instead of going to shops and
banks.
School of Everything was using
the internet to change things in a
different direction. We felt we
could put into practice, on a grand
scale, the kind of ideas that maybe
sounded utopian when Illich was
writing about ‘learning webs’ in
the early Seventies.
We drew firstly from ideas from
the Sixties and Seventies of de-
schooling society and the Free
University at Stanford — all these
experiments in self-organised
learning that had flourished a gen-
eration earlier — and secondly on
a model of using the internet to
make stuff happen in the real
world.
At the centre of the School of
Everything model, there is still a
teacher-and-learner couple —
how are your ambitions reflected
in that?
We started out with a motto
which was ‘Everyone has some-
thing to learn, everyone has some-
thing to teach.’ The traditional
model of education creates an arti-
ficial scarcity of people who can
teach us, by only looking to pro-
fessional teachers who have the
skills to stand up in front of a class
of people who don’t want to be
there and keep them under con-
trol. Our alternative is to recognise
the abundance of skills and
knowledge and experience that is
out there in every neighbourhood,
in every workplace.
So the starting point for the
School of Everything site was how
you index the wealth of knowl-
edge and experience that is around
you. First we built profiles where
you could list the things that you
would be willing to teach or to
share. We got stuck working out
how to present that profile without
falling back into the teacher/
learner model. The first solution
we had was that everybody who
4
Agile Learning: Unplugged issue, 2011
signs up has both a teaching and a
learning profile.
That gets you part of the way
there. But there is definitely a
space in the middle, which it was
harder to structure. Maybe there is
something that happens quite
naturally and informally if you get
a group of people together face-to-
face — a fluid shifting of roles —
which is harder to emulate online.
The direction we’re moving in
now, where School of Everything
supports people getting together
in groups, might be one way to
find that heart of really informal,
self-organised learning.
What connections do you see
between School of Everything
and your work outside?
One way that it connects is
through ‘asset-based’ approaches.
Asset-Based Community Devel-
opment offers an alternative to
conventional development, with
its tendency to define people in
terms of their needs, their deficit.
You can see these same patterns in
regeneration, in international de-
velopment, and in the marketing
culture which defines us as con-
sumers, as a source of demand.
Against that, the asset-based ap-
proach says, ‘Let’s start the other
way round, by looking what is al-
ready present in a situation — the
skills, the possibility, the re-
sources, the experience — and
treating that as something that
might be being undervalued’. Ac-
tually, there is already an abun-
dance there.
School of Everything was ap-
proaching education from that
perspective.
On the first day that we sat
down to work properly on School
of Everything in September 2006, I
remember saying two things. One
was that I thought that by the time
we had got this working there was
every chance that there would be a
major global economic crisis (you
only remember the predictions
that come true!). But I added that
what we were building would be
more and not less useful in a world
which had been changed by that.
Because universities and schools
and colleges are very expensive
and inefficient ways to organise
learning. And because, while I talk
about living in a time of abun-
dance, actually, the culture we are
living in is characterised by artifi-
cial scarcity as well. While we feel
there is an abundance of knowl-
edge and skills, that abundance is
somehow not visible to main-
stream policy-making and the way
learning happens in the education
system.
Are you just switching from scaling up to the global supply of
one institutional footing to an- high-quality content are missing
other — from the state-guided the fact that there is also this scal-
models of Higher Education and ing down to something that is
Further Education to a new model more satisfying on a human scale
that runs on Google apps in the than people’s experiences of uni-
cloud and resources from iTunes versities as institutions tend to be.
U?
I think it goes both ways. Last
year I was part of a discussion
with senior Higher Education fig-
ures for Demos’s The Edgeless Uni-
versity project. At the end of it I
said to the guy from Demos who
was running the project, ‘That felt
like being in a room with a bunch
of record company executives in
1999.’
The HE people were being quite
complacent because they said,
‘You enthusiasts for technology see
education as a transactional proc-
ess of pushing units of knowledge
to learners, whereas actually much
of the value of education is in the
relationships with the people
teaching them and with the institu- Agile alchemy
tions they belong to.’ After David Jennings interviewed
What they were ignoring was David Gauntlett last summer (see
that you can also achieve a rich- Page 7), a curious Gauntlett decided
ness of relationship through the to turn the tables on his interviewer,
scaling down that technology starting by trying to pin down what
makes possible. Universities sit at Jennings meant by Agile Learning.
a scale which might have been op- Here are the answers he got.
timal to where the world was at 30
or 50 years ago, when the costs of Rather than being tightly defined I
organising and finding other peo- see Agile Learning as a family of
ple were quite high. approaches, in which self-
As networks make those costs organising by learners looks prom-
ising, that offer a response to the
lower, not only is it true that you
unprecedented circumstances we
can get a better lecture from iTunes
find ourselves in now.
U than if you went to the lecture
Firstly, a lot of money has been
theatre (the scaling up side of it).
pumped into grandiose internet-
But you can also find a richer and
more engaged environment in based learning initiatives. Al-
which to learn closely with others though the small-pieces-loosely-
and build relationships through joined ethos and Web 2.0 ap-
coming to a meetup like those we proaches have been with us for
organise in the Royal Festival Hall years, the interventionist public
than you might find going to a sector tendency to Think Big vastly
university seminar. overestimated what top-down ini-
tiatives can attain.
Maybe that is a slightly utopian
Secondly, ‘agile’ is about look-
account. But I think that there is a
ing at emergent, adaptive learning
risk that institutions which only
in the commons of the internet. If
see the threat from technology as a
People Learning Something: a ‘wordle’ representation of the most commonly
used words across the eight interviews
we chart these flexible, low-
overhead behaviours and under-
stand the contexts where each is
effective, we can start to map out
more bottom-up learning experi-
ences. As they work with the grain
of learners’ habits, and are rooted
in people's intuitive approaches to
using the net for discovery and
problem-solving, they’re more
likely to ‘stick’. Enabling people to
self-organise the goals, methods
and the degree and timing of their
collaboration with other learners
enables agile learning.
Consulting with authority
Agile Learning potentially
changes the power relationships in
learning. We're used to contexts
where the agenda, environment
and the methods are managed and
predetermined; why? Learners
now have access to a massive
range of tools and resources for
learning and can build new
knowledge and skills as it suits.
Learners won’t always be the
best judges. But when they’ve got
something they want help or ad-
vice with, it might become more
like consulting a doctor, taking
such professional advice and
follow-up seriously. They might
say, ‘We’ve got as far as we can
with what we're trying to do, now
we’d like some direction, or help.’
So let’s recognise these emerging
online learning behaviours but ac-
cept we'll only get so far with
those alone. A bit of timely coach-
ing can significantly improve on
what people pick up on their own.
Reframing teaching
Teaching remains a matter of
judgement, and often of on-the-
spot improvisation, about when to
exercise authority. But the framing
and boundaries of that authority
can be tamed to ensure that teach-
ers would bend to public interest,
as Illich suggests, rather than per-
petuating their professional inter-
ests. Howard Jacobson said re-
cently that ‘authority is intrinsic to
education, and the fact that author-
ity is fallible doesn't change this,’
but we can frame that authority to
lead us into a different space.
Let them eat Google
If an internet-connected com-
puter is the basic infrastructure —
as in Sugata Mitra’s Hole in the Wall
model — do we just leave learners
to figure out the rest? We need to
reframe what teaching is about, to
provide the optimum further sup-
port to enhance self-organised
learning. That’s the space that Ag-
ile Learning needs to explore and
Agile Learning: Unplugged issue, 2011
5
chart. For example, before Web 2.0
services like del.icio.us, when I
was on the board of an independ-
ent cinema, I advocated the idea of
extending our educational activi-
ties to include curated web re-
sources about our specialist film
seasons. The educator might be-
come a curator, a facilitator, help-
ing to select the right tools, identi-
fying when creating a wiki might
be useful, or suggesting ‘you
might like to try…’
Contracting in
Learners might ‘contract in’ the
teaching, support and authorita-
tive guidance when they want,
rather than it being planned for
them. In this respect School of Eve-
rything looks promising as they’re
introducing features to support
groups of learners. Originally in-
dividual learners found and hired
individual teachers, a market led
by what teachers offer; generic,
popular stuff: learn French, learn
bass guitar. With self-organising
groups there’s scope for offerings
to become demand-led.
Let’s say I want to be able to
appreciate French literature and
films. I’m unlikely to be able to
persuade a teacher to provide a
specially-tailored course unless I
pay. With a group sharing my in-
terests we're well-placed to com-
mission some bespoke support.
The fact the teacher’s contracted in
doesn’t stop them exercising
authority where it’s needed; like a
licensed counsellor.
I’m not sure how these prescrip-
tions might apply to schools’ pow-
erful apparatus of discipline and
orderliness designed to keep kids
off the street and make them work-
force fodder. But I am interested in
opening up the space around the
periphery of institutions, which
might retain an anchoring role.
Basket of techniques
Agile Learning is broader than
these prescriptions; a bundle of
loosely connected methods that
work to differing degrees in differ-
ent contexts. What ties them to-
gether is the intent of being a low-
cost, learner-driven, flexible basket
of techniques.
But there’s no manifesto, no
tight definition, no trademark. It’s
an open enquiry and enterprise,
which through a community of
practice could be taken to school,
perhaps initially through Free
Schools. Bringing together this
basket of agile techniques could
make them look more ‘serious’
than when seen as scattered and
small-scale.
Creating
informality
Tony Hall is a photographer who
became interested in learning through
community photography projects with
young adults. He created informal
learning environments and allowed
learners the freedom to set their own
agenda. With the increased
accessibility of technology, he
describes his interests as ‘thinking
about sustainable learning
communities, shared learning in
public spaces, using social media’.
Tony doesn’t see himself as a
teacher. ‘I got into teaching
through not wanting to teach,’ he
says. ‘A few people in a youth cen-
tre were interested in something I
was interested in: photography.
They felt that I could probably
help them. And being outside
school was important. Some of
them were unbelievably bright.
Some may have been failed by
school, but there was a real mix of
kids. They weren't much younger
than me: I was 21 or 22; they were
16 to 19. Because I was seen as the
photographer, I was the key char-
acter in that group. I could get
stuff as well: enlargers from up in
town; I could get film cheap in
Soho. That was part of the deal.’
Tony Hall (centre) with the young people participating in photography at his
local youth club, London, 1969
Tony sees learning as a social
activity: ‘It's to do with relation-
ships. Learning for me is not some-
thing you do by yourself — not in
the way I do it, anyway. I’ve al-
ways felt I need to learn with other
people. I never wanted to use the
word “teaching” or being a
“teacher”. I have to use it to work
in institutional spaces, but it’s not
a word that sits comfortably with
me.
‘Learning for me is never about
being stuck in a classroom and
someone telling you how to do
something. It's always to do with a
process. Various characters get in-
volved in that process. Some are
better at explaining things or pre-
senting something, offering up bits
of knowledge, or finding some-
thing we can use — but it's never
just one person.’
Learning is a pragmatic, experi-
ential process for Tony. ‘It’s that
make-do, but also making some-
thing out of that make-do. It’s not
learning something for the sake of
learning; it’s trying to make some-
thing. And then the conversations
that came out of the practice,
whereby you're involved in doing
something together. Somehow
what we were doing in terms of
this thing called “photography”
wasn’t photography. It’s more a
case of us getting involved with
each other and trying something
out, having a bit of fun doing it.’
Tony’s experience with informal
and community learning projects
has made him wary of formal
learning environments. ‘Institu-
tionalised education isn’t a place I
want to be. I tried many times to
be involved inside the space, creat-
ing groups and projects inside
these organisations. But I found
that I spent huge amounts of time
dealing with the administrators
rather than doing the learning
stuff. The first learning project,
building the darkroom, was about
being let loose in a space with a
bunch of people who had a shared
interest. Out of that came a lot of
other stuff — lots of conversations,
around music and culture. As long
as we could get a photograph out
first of all, then something else
comes from that. You don’t know
what’s going to come out of it until
somebody comes along and says,
“I want to take this kind of photo-
graph”. And then you can talk to
them in depth. What I liked about
photography was that anyone
could do it, at least in terms of get-
ting started.’
Tony worked with people in
day centres throughout the Eight-
ies. ‘A lot of time, I felt as though I
was walking into their world, their
environment, and I always felt that
I needed to just be there, as a pho-
tographer, and that somehow the
conversations would start. In one
environment, for example, I set up
a dark room for people with men-
tal and physical disabilities. It be-
came their own space within the
institutional space. They made it in
a way: they made it their space
with me. And it happened because
people allowed themselves to get
involved with me in a day centre,
and because I was different from
what was going on there. It be-
comes something we did together,
making this dark room… accessi-
ble in a way.
‘There were 11 or 12 people
floating around who got involved.
It’s always the same: one or two
people get interested, and then
they know somebody else, who
they bring in, who sits on the side
of the group, but they then get in-
volved, and once you’ve got a ba-
sic interest amongst those few
people, then you can begin to get
something out of it.
‘When you actually begin a se-
ries of conversations with them,
and continue over a period of time,
they just want you to understand
them a little bit. And because
you're this person who takes pho-
tographs, they also want to do this
thing called photography. Obvi-
ously, I go in there with a sort of
vaguely framed way of thinking
around it, in terms of a project I
would like to do… but sometimes
it never works out!’
By being seen as a photographer
rather than a teacher, Tony feels he
can accomplish more. ‘Because
then you begin to look at what
thinking is and what learning is. It
is a social thing that's going on. It’s
us negotiating something to do
with an activity together… For me
learning’s about change as well:
6
Agile Learning: Unplugged issue, 2011
changing yourself. It’s not just
thinking, it’s changing your think-
ing a bit. That’s the great thing
about pictures, because you can
negotiate through the picture
without being provoked. So you’re
always displacing the activity and
you're talking about this thing
here, but you know you’re talking
with each other, really. You don’t
have to do eye contact all the time,
so the picture becomes a little re-
flecting device.’
Learning all the
time, everywhere
David spoke to his friend Annie, who,
with her partner Guy, decided to
educate their two sons at home. Annie
and Guy didn't set out to be home
educators. Annie had read Illich's
Deschooling Society at school, out of
academic, rather than a personal,
interest. But it was a series of practical
considerations and social connections
that led them to go down this route
themselves.
David Jennings: How did your
‘induction’ as a home educator
work?
Annie Weekes: Initially it was
based on local contacts, such as
with a nearby Sydenham home ed
group. This was in 1999, when the
examples of home education that
you could find online were mostly
in the US, and those were mostly
faith-based, so they didn’t feel
relevant to us. In the UK, there was
an email list that I joined. Over the
years that has grown, as more
people came online, and it’s splin-
tered into lots of smaller, specialist
lists.
When I started it felt like, after
only a relatively short time, I knew
most of the people who were ac-
tive in home education and inter-
ested in sharing experiences. The plicitly their idea of what’s
first time I went to HESFES [the worthwhile and educational.
annual week-long summer gather- Many might say, ‘Oh, yeah, but
ing of home educators], it was they’re only making a film — lots
such a relief. Just being in a field of people could just do that — why
full of people I didn't have to ex- aren't they doing a real project?’
plain myself to felt liberating and Loads of parents have a very nar-
relaxing. Again, HESFES has ex- row definition of what’s educa-
panded massively in the time tional and what's not. Even with
we’ve been going to it. [Wikipedia babies, if they’re picking up stones
says it has grown from around 50 and putting them down, they’ll
families in 1998 to around 1,500 whisk those away and replace
families in 2006.] them with specially-designed toys.
The kids don't see the dif-
ference between learning
and not learning any
more than most adults do
You made a bold decision, in-
cluding a change of career path —
so what have been the pluses and
minuses of that for you?
It’s really quite hard to say. For
the first few years I was quite
evangelical about it, naturally.
You’ve only known me in my later,
more jaded years! In a way, I don’t
even think of myself as a home
educator any more. I don’t identify
myself as one. School seems like a
weird idea now: I can’t imagine
why people do it.
How far ahead do you plan?
How about your boys — how Do you know what you’ll be do-
do they keep in touch with their ing with your boys when they
peers? start again, after a holiday, say?
The same way everyone else of No. They don’t ‘stop’ at any
their age does: mobile phones, point. Some people organise things
Facebook, MSN Messenger. with holidays, but we don't.
This is actually one of the clas-
sic objections to home education
that people always come up with,
‘What about socialisation?’ I’ve
never quite worked out what they
mean by that.
Often people dress it up as,
‘How do they ever get to meet
people?’ Which has this kind of
subtext of, ‘How do you manage
to act like a normal human being
in the world?’ Well, we live in the
world, and we probably see more
of it than most schoolchildren. It’s
always framed in terms of meet-
ing other kids, rather than sociali-
sation as citizens and workers.
Is there scope in home educa-
tion for you to let a group of kids
define their own goals?
Sometimes that happens. One
of my boys has made films with
other people. But that’s com-
pletely off their own bat. Both
animated and live action shorts.
He and two of his mates make a
film and edit it. They make the
props and find the costumes.
Educationally that’s a tricky or
contentious area, because a lot
depends on someone stating ex-
 So it’s heavily improvised?
Entirely improvised. It’s driven
by what they’re interested in. As I
say, that’s what can make it hard.
Someone will appear downstairs at
11pm and say, ‘So, the Italians
were invading Abyssinia in when-
ever, and…?’ You think, ‘Oh my
god! Isn't Google working this
evening?’ They don't really see the
difference between learning and
not learning any more than most
adults do.
Most people say that messing
around on the internet to find stuff
out is not learning. To which I say,
‘Why not?’ And they say, ‘I sup-
pose… but it’s not really the same.’
Because the correspondence
they’ve made is to pre-structured
blocks of activity that lead to a
qualification.
A) you can’t get a qualification
for it, and B) almost the definition
of learning seems to be that you
don't enjoy doing it. Those are the
two things that make it learning.
Or that someone other than
you defines the outcome you're
supposed to aim for.
Exactly, and that seems to be
what makes it real learning. There
was a nice quote someone sent me
by John Holt — the educator, not
the reggae singer — ‘The difficulty
with learning to trust our children
is that first we have to learn to
trust ourselves’ in terms of defin-
ing their learning. And that’s the
same with adults.
Ivan Illich,
who argued
that many
institutions end
up exacerbating
the problems they
were created to
solve, was the most
frequently cited writer
in the interviews
Agile Learning: Unplugged issue, 2011
7
Joining up
thinking
David Gauntlett is a fellow
participant in the School of
Everything Unplugged meetups in
London — when his lecturing
commitments at University of
Westminster allow. Perhaps unusually
for someone on the editorial board of a
journal called Foucault Studies,
David makes his ideas accessible by
expressing himself in very
straightforward everyday terms.
This is very much of a piece with the
agenda that David is advancing, one
that sets a lot of store by giving people
the means to influence and remake the
worlds they live in through creative
engagement with their environment
and each other. This echoes one of the
influences he cites: Ivan Illich, whose
books such as Disabling Professions
and Tools for Conviviality look
towards a gently radical
empowerment of citizens.
David’s book, Making is
Connecting, is published by Polity in
the spring.
David Jennings: Can you describe
some of the themes you develop
in Making is Connecting?
Well, the title gives the starting
point. I mean ‘making is connect-
ing’ in three main ways:
• First, making is connecting be-
cause you have to connect
things together (materials and
ideas) to make something new;
• Second, making is connecting
because acts of creativity usu-
ally involve, at some point, a
social dimension and connect
us with other people;
• And making is connecting be-
cause through making things
and sharing them in the world,
we increase our engagement
and connection with our social
and physical environments.
At first I thought it would be
like a description of changes that
are happening, but now it’s more
of a prescription as well. Creative
opportunities: people turning off
their televisions and doing some-
thing more interesting instead.
So how does that improve
people’s lives as citizens and
learners?
Sitting back and consuming
media for entertainment or infor-
mation is fine, but one of the
things we know about learning is
that you learn through doing
things, and being active — putting
information together in new ways
yourself, rather than just receiving
Working with Lego at the Connection Factory with David Gauntlett (left),
Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster
it. If you’re actually going to en-
gage with something, then a crea-
tive process of thinking and mak-
ing will not only help you learn
about that thing, but also help you
create new ideas about that thing.
In what way is sharing impor-
tant to your prescription?
It’s hard to separate out the im-
portance of sharing because it’s all
part of one process. Obviously, you
can be creative on your own,
locked away in a room writing a
novel or a symphony, but I think
basically creativity is a social proc-
ess where much of the value or
reward that we get from doing it
comes from sharing and getting
feedback, and being inspired by
other people. So I think at its heart
it’s a social process. That’s why
you need sharing, otherwise
you’re losing something. Even
creative people who work alone
ultimately want to share their
work — so sharing is part of crea-
tivity.
You use Lego a lot, and refer to
it as a ‘tool for thinking’ — why?
Building on the principles of
Lego Serious Play, it’s encouraging
people to think about questions
and problems, build responses in
Lego (or any creative material) and
discuss and talk and share.
Everyone gets to express some
of their thoughts or feelings, and
share them, exploring different as-
pects of the problem. You can get
everyone to collaborate by putting
the things they’ve built into one
shared model through negotiation.
That gets your brain firing on all
cylinders while you’re doing it,
instead of a more conservative
model where you just absorb what
a teacher or a book tells you.
There’s a sense in your work —
when you refer to William Mor-
ris, for example, or cite Richard
Sennett’s The Craftsman — of
rolling back the industrialisation
and mass media models of the
last 150 years. I haven’t read The
Craftsman — why is that book
important to you?
What I think Richard Sennett’s
book boils down to — amid lots of
interesting examples — is an at-
tempt to prove that thinking and
making are part of the same proc-
ess. It’s not that you have thoughts
and make plans, and then you
make something, but the process
of making things is also a deeply
intellectual process.
In terms of ‘rolling back 150
years’, it’s not really about that,
but maybe it is about reconnecting
with the kind of everyday creativ-
ity which may have flourished
more in the past, and which
doesn’t flourish in a consumerist,
TV-watching society. Today we
have tools to share the fruits of
that creativity, easily and widely,
which they didn’t have before, so
that’s bound to help.
You mention the Transition
Towns movement as an example
of Making is Connecting — could
you explain why?
Transition Towns are an oppor-
tunity for people to come together
and make something new — make
their town anew — which creates
social connections through shared
concerns. It also means that people
are actively taking an interest in
the way their town does business
and transport and services. So it’s
about having that active connec-
tion with your environment.

Agile skills,
agile methods
Dick Moore was Director of
Technology at Ufi/learndirect and has
a deep understanding of technology
infrastructure and development
methodologies. As well as speaking to
David Jennings, he provided some
original material, included here.
Agile Development
Customer satisfaction by rapid, con-
tinuous delivery of useful software and
systems
Working software and systems deliv-
ered frequently (weeks rather than
months and years)
Working software and client satisfaction
are the measure of progress
Late changes are welcomed rather than
rejected out of hand
Close, daily cooperation between clients Close relationship between educators and
and developers learners (often with blurred roles)
Face-to-face conversation is the best
form of communication requiring co-
location
Projects are built around motivated indi-
viduals who are trusted
Continuous attention to technical excel-
lence and good design
Simplicity
Self-organising teams of 5-9 to facilitate
development
Regular adaption to changing circum-
stances
There is no single tool set rather a col-
lection of tools and processes that sup-
port agile development
Dick Moore’s comparison of ‘agile’ approaches in software development and
in learning
8
Agile Learning: Unplugged issue, 2011
Agile Learning and Agile Software
Development
Dick Moore believes that you can
build agile learning experiences in
an evolutionary fashion. You set
out with a clear goal, and iterate as
you go to make sure that you’re
still on track. In the process you
learn something; perhaps that this
is the wrong way to do it, or that
you're asking the wrong question!
Having clear goals, which are eas-
ily tested so you know when
you’ve reached them, does not
mean that you can’t change the
goals, with the consent of the in-
terested parties.
Dick’s analysis of the parallels
between agile software develop-
ment and agile learning is laid out
in the table below.
Shallow versus deep learning & core
agile skills
The need to acquire new skills
and knowledge rapidly, combined
with the knowledge engine that is
Agile Learning
Learner satisfaction by rapid attainment of
learning concepts that can be applied
Attainment of new models of understand-
ing and assessment building upon each
other in short durations (months)
The ability to apply and contextualise
learning with clear signs of progress and
development
The ability to change particular learning
goals as understanding or issues arise
Regular communication (daily/weekly)
mixing synchronous and asynchronous
communication as a key feature, and
augmented via technology
There has to be shared vision and com-
mon goal for the learning activity
Having well defined goals and structure
and of ‘high quality’
Clear objectives, though still open to
change
As per Bloom's ‘two sigma problem’,
mastery learning can be applied in small
groups, with strong communication
OK to change learning goal or aim mid-
session providing its agreed
No one method or way of being an agile
learner or supporting Agile Learning, but
they require a goal and some organisation
Google Goggles recognises real world objects and displays relevant
information about them on your phone. The scope for project-based, mobile
learning is enormous
the internet, promotes self-directed
learning — be it formal, informal
or recreational; access to how-to
videos via YouTube, and the previ-
ous set of how-to documentation
that underpinned the open source
Linux development platform have
shown that recipes, plus a learning
goal, can form the basis of signifi-
cant learning and development
programmes, especially if under-
taken through a series of learning
iterations.
There is a view that says that
every Google query is a piece of
shallow Agile Learning; there is a
goal (a question requiring an an-
swer), a tool (search engine) and a
need for some analysis of content
(the results returned by the en-
gine). However you need to be ca-
pable of discriminating on the reli-
ability of sources, so effective use
of search engines may require a
range of core agile skills, which
could be:
a) formulation of queries,
b) how to judge the providence
and veracity of what is re-
turned
c) basic technology skills that are
not yet universal.
The degree to which these core
agile skills are similar to the litera-
cies of self-organised learners is
more about your degree of compe-
tence than whether or not you
have these skills. Anyone who uses
Google will have them to some ex-
tent. Having a clear goal that one
or more people can focus around
in short iterations and a way of
measuring this provides an end
point; clear criteria that define the
end of a learning iteration can only
be a good thing.
These might be:
• after this iteration I will be able
to…
• after this iteration I can demon-
strate…
• after this iteration I can explain
and show the relationships be-
tween…
So having these core skills and
an understanding of learning itera-
tions are key for agile learning.
Assessing Agile Learning
The assessment challenges with
Agile Learning are much the same
as with any other form of learning.
If certification is required, then
there has to be some sort of rigor-
ous assessment that underpins the
knowledge and practical skills be-
ing taught.
Every Google query is a
piece of shallow Agile
Learning; there is a
goal, a tool and a need
Concerns such as impersona-
tion, plagiarism, weak testing re-
gimes, and corruption all apply.
However, in Agile Learning we
have some advantages in that clear
goals are set, intervals are defined
and are typically short and there
may be an end result delivered via
a group, allowing the group to
self-assess (something that should
be encouraged). Moderation may
of course be needed.
For more formal qualifications
then formal assessment might be
considered. The UK Driving Test
with its theory and practical test
might be considered a good exam-
ple of Agile Learning. There’s the
theory test that's now part of the
Driving Test: you pick these things
up not just through the British
School of Motoring, but through
talking to your friends, going on a
simulator, buying a book, and so
on. This is an example of Agile
Learning blending into accredita-
tion. There is also ‘tacit knowl-
edge’ that you can’t pick up from
just talking and reading. Agile
Learning won’t help you learn to
ride a bike.
In my experience in Agile
Learning, you define the pace, you
decide which elements you want
to do when, you decide who you
learn with as a group. It is agile to get the ball rolling. But at the start,
me when you have a suite of tools Organisational it can be a heavy process. There are
and a suite of communication
practices allowing a real blend of
originals a lot of culture issues, like, ‘Why
should I give away my knowledge
formal and informal learning. Ag- Can social networks be environments that is making me valuable in a
ile Learning doesn't have to be as- for real learning? What would happen company?’
sessed, but if you want it to be, if you tried to mash up social So I thought it would be better
you can put in place methods that networking and knowledge to enable more everyday learning,
will work. management with a human-centred to allow the individual to organise
approach to how people learn and the material the way they want to.
Agile Learning and the roll-out of the
develop in organisations? Because, in a wiki, someone has to
mobile internet
set a structure and that doesn’t
Mobile internet, especially with Ollie is co-founder of the Oslo-based necessarily reflect our individual
things such as Android phones, is NoddleSoft. Its first offering, as a mental models of how things are
the most exciting new platform startup company, is a platform called linked and what’s relevant to me.
since the Sinclair spectrum and I NoddlePod,. What interested me was That was the first thing: I wanted
expect it to have a greater impact NoddlePod’s emphasis on employees individuals to be able to create a different for each individual
than the PC or laptops. Adding a driving their own social learning in an structure that reflected how they learner. So it’s a matter of connect-
whole range of sensory devices emergent process. As Ollie put it in thought and what they actually ing the content with the context
(light sensor — camera; directional her blog, ‘I simply don't believe that needed of content or information. that’s valuable to the individual,
— compass; sonic — microphone; people can “be developed”.’ They have The idea of NoddlePod sprung based on their own need and pre-
RFID), combined with Global Posi- to be active, not passive, to develop. from there… You could make the ferred way of learning. As you
tioning System and internet con- platform social, in that I can actu-
David Jennings: How did you elaborate on the structure, you're
nection, will open up significant ally share what information is
come to found NoddleSoft and creating your own world and your
new learning opportunities. We relevant to me now.
where have you got to with it? own learning.
can in effect carry a learning de-
It's not like a project manage- We believe that individuals will
vice that will increasingly under- Ollie Gardener: I founded Nod-
ment, delegation type of thing… benefit from having a ‘hanger’ to
stand its physical context and al- dleSoft out of frustration — frus-
But we can work towards individ- make sense out of their content,
low us to integrate our world. tration that I was in a role where
ual things and still benefit from whether that content is a training
my role was to enable learning, yet
each others’ learning along the programme or a website they’ve
The world will contain I came to feel that what I was do-
way.
ing was more about managing and found, or discussions with col-
a data layer from which So how does NoddlePod help? leagues, or to-do items for their
controlling learning. I felt more of
meaning can be a bottleneck than an enabler. It’s a marriage between a project own work.
accessed and I was in charge of implementing management tool and a social What areas of enterprise activ-
knowledge inferred wikis and forums to enable network like Facebook. ity do you think NoddlePod is
knowledge-sharing across compa- Content-focused tools like blogs best suited for?
With applications like Google nies and within companies. I loved and wikis leave out additional When we built it, we referred a
Goggles, we already have the abil- the idea of it, but I also came cues, like ‘When do I need this in- lot to graduate programme,
ity to analyse photographs, ex- across all of the obstacles to mak- formation? In what context is this knowledge programmes, talent
tracting semantic information and ing it work. It’s fabulous once you relevant?’ And that’s going to be programmes.
other data from them, linking
through to secondary sources. In-
creasingly the world through
which we navigate will contain a
data layer from which meaning
can be accessed and knowledge
inferred.
We can readily expect informa-
tion and knowledge to remain in
the cloud rather than on personal
or corporate servers. My feeling is
that the mobile internet will accel-
erate this, providing even larger
layers of data that will be mined
for meaning.
Outside what we call the First
World there is a demand for edu-
cation, and a thirst for knowledge
at a low unit cost, which mobile
technologies may be able to pro-
vide, so the emerging economies
might adopt Agile Learning solu-
tions quickly due to the low entry
cost. Closer to home, we may see
mobile internet blur the boundary
between formal and informal
learning, access to knowledge and
offering information that is always
on, encouraging agile learning
practices.

NoddlePod screenshot showing project outline (left pane) and item view (right pane)

Agile Learning: Unplugged issue, 2011 9

 However, we’ve actually found
that NoddlePod is just as valuable
for an enterprise that deploys it as
part of an organisational develop-
ment process. They use it to con-
nect change agents across the or-
ganisation who have different
roles in implementing an organisa-
tional strategy. So these agents,
working on different bits of the
process, connect and discuss to see
if people are experiencing the
same kind of resistance or issues.
Are there particular kinds of
companies that welcome the
NoddlePod approach? What resis-
tance have you met?
I’ve targeted employee-
engagement-aware companies. I
think that’s a growing sector, and
people are starting to value the in-
dividual in all of this. They’re rec-
ognising that we shouldn’t being
trying to create copies; we should
be creating originals and encour-
aging individuals to make a
unique contribution to the com-
pany.
If companies treat recruits as
interchangeable according to the
role they’re given, it’s as if they’re
just a jigsaw puzzle piece. People
aren’t like that. You will get a lot
more value from each individual
employee, if you connect with
their reason for being. If you can
connect with what drives them —
as an employee and as a human —
it makes for a more healthy organ-
isational culture, with more inno-
vation, much more initiative and
engagement and productivity.
A lot of the barriers are to do
with there being so many organisa-
tional structures that are there to
control and to moderate and to
steer the organisation. Those struc-
tures are there because of tradition,
because of status, or because of
fear. I think it’s probably harder for
bigger companies, because of ad-
ministration challenges of scale.
We don’t trust our employees
and, really, if that is the honest an-
swer when you dig deep enough,
you’ve got a problem. You’re not
going to succeed as an organisa-
tion if you can’t trust the people
that you've hired. If those people
know that you don't trust them,
then what commitment will they
have? How will they engage? Will
they contribute their best ideas to
the organisation, or will they keep
them to themselves and do their
own thing?
In the past we focused too nar-
rowly on productivity and control.
I think productivity is kind of a
side effect of doing all the other
things right.
10
Agile Learning: Unplugged issue, 2011
Brokering
learning
Fred Garnett has been invlved in all
forms of learning from prisons to
government, and from US universities
to the now-defunct BECTA, and is
now interested in fresh ways of
generating learning contexts.
Fred explores how learners deal with
the unknown and reframe problems in
an unpredictable world: how they
create context out of ambiguity. He is
particularly interested in how learners
create the conditions to manage their
own learning, and interact with
authority and power in learning. The
challenge this represents to teacher-led
learning can be anathema to
traditional models.
In traditional pedagogy, the
teacher decides what the learner
needs to know, and how the
knowledge and skills should be
taught. Fred uses new terms to de-
scribe alternatives to this: ‘andra-
gogy’, a shift from taught to self-
directed education, typical of adult
and community learning contexts,
where learners are involved in
planning their learning activities,
facilitated by teachers and centred
on experiences and problem-
solving; and ‘heutagogy’, a further
development where learners have
enough confidence in and mastery
of their own learning that they can
reframe problems.
Fred suggests that heutagogy
can be seen as ‘the ability to play
with form and create new ones’.
Learners generate their own con-
texts to help them understand
complex situations, and learning
comes close to improvisation as a
means of dealing with these situa-
tions. Fred is interested in ‘how
you deal with the unknown con-
structively’, designing
Architectures of Partici-
pation (AoP) in learning.
A big music fan, he
used these ideas to ana-
lyse The Beatles’ career
on the 9 after 909 blog. In
their early years, they
were taught the craft of
studio recording by
producer George Martin
— their pedagogic
phase. In their andra-
gogic period in the mid-
Sixties, Martin made a
tactical withdrawal, be-
coming more facilitator
than teacher. This
shifted to heutagogy as
The Beatles mastered the
disciplines and tech-
niques until they could
play the studio as though it were
itself an instrument. In 1967 they
made records such as Strawberry
Fields Forever and I Am The Walrus
that used the studio in ways that
cut it free from its function of
documenting musical perform-
ances.
Fred believes that learners using
online technologies, can co-create
their learning. In doing so, the AoP
requires an examination of the
principles in institutional redesign.
If Learner Generated Contexts
(LGCs) are ‘a coincidence of moti-
vations leading to agile configura-
tions’, then institutions need to be
capable of adapting to post-Web
2.0 multi-context learning. An AoP
is about enabling ‘adaptive institu-
tions’ to work across collaborative
networks.
There are many practical exam-
ples on a small scale, often where
teachers factor in new tech tools
and collaboration, treating learn-
ing as a holistic process. Most insti-
tutions, limited by funding and
their need to track their learners,
do this only on short-term projects:
they don’t go on to become fully
adaptive. The tools and processes
to support this adaptive process
are available, but the mindset of IT
Service departments in education
institutions has yet to embrace
them.
Fred describes his own teaching
practice as ‘brokering learning’:
interpreting what the education
system would accredit as learning
and enabling students ‘to do stuff
they were interested in. Brokering
is about taking learners’ interests
and mapping them to formal
learning outcomes’, he says. In the
USA, ‘you write the syllabus of
every course you teach’, enabling
teachers to rebuild the syllabus for
learning.
‘Brokering is using your knowl-
edge of the educational system to
negotiate with learners about what
they want to do, a form of andra-
gogy. Brokering is the craft skill of
teaching, and takes time to de-
velop. The key aspect in making
brokering work are the assess-
ments, and what is assessed. If you
can let the learner select syllabus
areas that interest them, or negoti-
ate the form or the timing of ex-
ams, you can motivate them a lot.
‘Teachers need to be confident
to move from delivery to negotia-
tion and brokering, instead of hid-
ing behind knowledge or learning
materials. Learners come to under-
stand the education process and
how learning is assessed. They be-
come capable of seeing how their
work will be marked and can de-
velop their own assessment crite-
ria.’
Teachers need to be con-
fident to move to nego-
tiation and brokering,
instead of hiding behind
knowledge
Currently learners do not have
the enterprise and know-how to
generate their own learning con-
texts: we need assessment to prove
that learning has occurred, a bar-
rier to learners developing the
confidence to take control. ‘It isn’t
possible to allow learners to gen-
erate their own contexts without
pedagogic, institutional and as-
sessment redesign’, says Fred. ‘The
current system requires learners to
adapt to pedagogically-driven as-
sessment as it has the power to al-
locate the rewards to that model.
The existing power structures for
education are loaded against
learner enterprise.’
Fred and his team developed an
E-maturity Framework for Further
Education (EMFFE) with 15 col-
leges which appreciated its devel-
opmental qualities. ‘In the EMFFE
and the AoP we use quality im-
provement indicators and inspec-
tion processes and design them
into the everyday processes used
by teachers. Staff record activities
which create dynamic systems
which are also inspection reports
and the basis of future planning
reviews.’
Fred has two underpinning
principles. “Everyone wants to
learn, which is not the basis of our
designed-to-fail education system.
Secondly, post-Web-2.0 tools en-
able participatory learning proc-
esses to be supported by technol-
ogy. The opportunity to support
LGCs is what is new.
 ‘Plato’s original Academy did
not set up the Academic model
that we think of. The Academia
was the building where Socrates
sat and debated subjects, a nearby
orchard allowed learner discus-
sions and a gymnasium provided
physical exercise. Learning was
seen as instruction, conversation
and activity in formal, informal
and non-formal contexts, but we
only retain the formal part, call it
Academic and ascribe it to Plato to
validate it. Even our notion of
“Academic” is misunderstood and
used to support a false position of
power, whereas LGCs were de-
signed as complementary proc-
esses into the original model. In a
way, LGCs have always been
around.’
Tools for
Agile
Learning
This section gives brief accounts of
instances where low-cost tools can
enable self-organised learning by
individuals and groups.
Towards
lightweight
learning
Teacher Lucy Johnson describes her
use of a blogging platform for enabling
emergent learning.
Blogger — who would have
thought this technology could
make for such a dynamic light-
weight learning tool? But what a
difference this has made to my
GCSE group. The students love
using the platform, they can cus-
tomise it, which gives them a real
sense of ‘ownership’ of their work,
they can link with their classmates
through the ‘follow’ device, thus
enabling peer-to-peer learning,
they can link with me, and, as the
lessons unfold, I can update my
blog in real time to respond to
their learning needs — for exam-
ple a lesson on advertising threw
up some brilliant ideas and I could
see the students were inching to-
wards the idea of ‘role models’ and
‘aspiration’ — they had the ideas
but not the vocabulary.
I saw that this was happening
and so posted this vocabulary and
definitions and the students re-
sponded enthusiastically.
Agile Learning: Unplugged issue, 2011
11
Sometimes it is tempting in les-
sons to introduce concepts that the
students have not heard of and so
‘stretch’ their learning, but if the
students cannot contextualise this
it can be frustrating for them. I like
being able to set a stage for learn-
ing which is in effect the classroom
and the task set, and then using a
platform such as Blogger to create
a collage of images, links and con-
cepts which pupils can dip into as
they wish, set against the back-
ground of this overarching task
that sets the direction and ‘tone’ of
the lesson.
Use a platform to cre-
ate a collage of images,
links and concepts
which pupils can dip
into as they like
So there are hints and signposts
towards extending the work we
are doing but it is down to the
learners whether or not to follow
these suggestions.
The internet is in some way a
‘lucky dip’, where, as Sugatra Mi-
tra has suggested, there are a
plethora of answers. But it is up to
me as the students’ guide to give
the questions and hint at the rich-
ness of responses that may be pos-
sible with a suitably creative atti-
tude. This is what, in my experi-
ence, Blogger is ideal for.
This approach would work with
other blogging platforms — any-
where where links and text and
images can be gathered and the
learner and teacher can relate to
each other in real time.
Commonplace
books 2.0
David Jennings vaingloriously
compares his use of an open source
wiki tool to the methods of
enlightenment-era thinkers.
Taking notes helps us digest our
experience. The act of distilling
and refining what we see and hear
does more than just produce a re-
cord or aide memoire; it lodges
each thought more deeply in mind.
Notes of meetings, lectures, vid-
eos, ideas that visit us when star-
ing out of the train window, key
passages of books and websites…
How to keep and manage all these
scribblings to make them more
useful for learning and problem
solving?
I guess I’m not alone in having
experimented with various shapes
and sizes of notebook — do you
keep everything in one book, or
use separate books for work, per-
sonal development, and so on?
Keeping a digital record makes it
easier to edit and rearrange notes
post hoc, and the process of link-
ing between disparate ideas fur-
ther enriches learning and creativ-
ity. In Where Do Good Ideas Come
From? Steven Johnson reports how
enlightenment-era thinkers kept
what they called a ‘commonplace’
book, to transcribe favourite quo-
tations and ideas. These books
were sometimes laboriously in-
dexed to allow different concepts
to bleed into each other. But how
often do we actually make the ef-
fort to go to these lengths?
For nearly three years now I’ve
been using something called Tid-
dlyWiki to make my notes more
flexible, integrated and link-aware.
TiddlyWiki is like a single-user
wiki site, except that it’s not a site,
it’s a single HTML file with some
javascript that manages the indi-
vidual pages (known as ‘tiddlers’).
I keep all my notes on TiddlyWiki
from meetings, to-do lists, observa-
tions from lectures or videos, web-
site clippings, even the tortuous
history of my complaints to my
bank. If I enter either the name of
another tiddler or a URL, it’s
automatically hyperlinked. And
every tiddler can be given as many
tags as you like to help cross-
referencing, navigation and brows-
ing for reflection.
Enlightenment-era
thinkers kept a
commonplace book to
record favourite
quotations and ideas
There are other proprietary
services, like Evernote and DE-
VONnote that offer similar func-
tionality, possibly with more so-
phistication. However, having
previously kept my notes on Psion
and Palm PDAs, and on the
Ma.gnolia social bookmarking site,
I know the aggravation caused
when these businesses stop sup-
porting old formats. TiddlyWiki
will keep working as long as there
are browsers that can read HTML
and javascript.
The fact that TiddlyWiki is just
one file makes it easily portable: I
carry mine round on a keychain
USB stick, which I use on my desk-
top and notebook computers. If
you spend a lot of your life in the
cloud, there’s a hosted option —
with a different set of security con-
siderations.
TiddlyWiki was developed by
Jeremy Ruston, and is published
under an open source licence. It
seems to be best known in the
developer/geek community, and
it’s eminently adaptable and hack-
able. However, I’ve managed to
use nearly all its features, and do
basic adaptations, without needing
to do any coding.
Meanwhile TiddlyWiki isn’t so
good if you like to jot drawings in
the margin — so you can keep
your moleskine notebooks for that.
But they’re a lot more expensive.
DIY social
networks for
schools
Lucy Johnson outlines the benefits —
and hazards — of using social
networks for student engagement in
her school
Social media can be a great tool for
enabling ‘student voice’ in school.
Which is why we started using the
Ning social network platform a
few years ago. Ning enables you to
create your own network by con-
figuring whatever social features
you want: blogs, forums, profiles,
activity streams, photos and vid-
eos.
Our test case was the school Eco
Committee. Initially, we were be-
devilled by privacy issues — that
is to say, policy restrictions on how
pictures of schoolchildren may be
used on the internet. However, as-
sisted by Rhiannon Scutt, Head of
Sustainability, our Ning has be-
come a useful tool for enabling
staff to keep in touch over a site
that covers two postcodes, about a
subject area that is not curriculum-
based.
The topic is now under threat of
becoming sidelined owing to gov-
ernment cuts in the sustainability
agenda, so it is no longer compul-
sory for schools to deliver. Yet the
headteacher’s support (feeling that
it reflects the Catholic ethos of our
school) combined with the low
overheads of running our Ning
network means that it has sur-
vived.
We began paying for the service
a year ago, to avoid having adverts
on the site, which we felt was in-
appropriate for schoolchildren.
This kind of low-cost, flexible
network infrastructure has tre-
mendous potential to forge con-
nections at a time when links and
communication are increasingly
necessary to support an ever more
complex and fractured society.
Though even these connections
come with further complexities at-
tached. The issue of intergenera-
tional relationships is fraught with
difficulties as teachers and stu-
dents reach out online in ways not
easily governed by institutional
procedures.
We have struggled with the lack
of policy and strategy in dealing
with these thorny areas. Simply
declaring that these platforms,
once classified as ‘social networks’,
have to be gated from the school
experience does nothing to address
the very important issues that are
arising around young people and
their experiences of the public do-
main online. These tools are too
important and too potentially
powerful to ignore.
Newspaper on
the web
For links to all the original, full-
length interviews in this paper,
plus links to the resources and ini-
tiatives mentioned in them, please
visit http://is.gd/jTr06
Or use this QR code to go there
Is your learning constipated by over-complex tools and over-specified processes?
12
Agile Learning: Unplugged issue, 2011
Conversation flows on Level 5 of the Royal Festival Hall
Join us at the Un-
plugged Meet-ups
Most of the conversations reported in
this paper are connected in some way
to an open, self-organised group that
meets weekly in London’s Royal
Festival Hall. This group was started
as a spin-off from the School of
Everything. Here, Patrick Hadfield,
consultant in organisation change
management, gives a personal account
of why he participates in the group.
The meetings take place from 10:30 to
12:30 each Wednesday. Everyone is
welcome. See the web page on the left
for full details.
ganisation development in a cor-
porate environment — what used
to be known as ‘training’ — and 14
months spent working on a change
programme developing a new
school curriculum in Scotland.
I approach the weekly informal
discussions from a different per-
spective to others; but then so do
they — one of the great things is
that everyone comes from a differ-
ent place and is willing to explore
and challenge others’ views.
Sometimes we have open, wide-
ranging discussions; sometimes
there is a set topic or subject — at
least for a while (before we stroll
off topic…). There are occasional
speakers, too, usually organised by
I’ve been going to the School of
Everything ‘Unplugged’ meetups
David Jennings — despite being a
self-organising group, it still takes
for several months; I don’t make
some organising, and David and
every week, but I am there fairly
Lucy Johnson seem to do most of
often. The main thing I get out of
that.
the meetup is the opportunity to
The energy of this group stems
meet like-minded people for chal-
from our different interests —
lenging conversation — a real
enough commonality to want to
positive.
hear what the others have to say,
I sometimes feel a bit of a fraud
enough difference to generate real
being there: most of the people
debate. It is also a very open group
there have more experience in
— anyone can turn up and take
education than I do, and more
part. And, apparently, we are a
formal understanding of peda-
friendly, welcoming bunch! One of
gogical theories and ideas. My in-
the rewarding things is how new-
terest in learning — aside from a
comers to the group always seem
passion for learning itself — stems
to react in a very positive fashion.
from my experience working in
learning and development and or-
Credits
This newspaper was written, ed-
ited and designed between 8 De-
cember 2010 and 3 January 2011 by
the team of David Jennings, Fred
Garnett, Ian McCleave, Lucy John-
son, Patrick Hadfield and Tony
Hall.
Photographs
Portraits of Dougald Hine, Ollie
Gardener, Annie Weekes, Tony
Hall by David Jennings. Portrait of
David Jennings by Lucy Vickery, of
Fred Garnett by Nigel Ecclesfield,
and of Dick Moore believed to be
by Gill Moore.
Meetup photo (this page) by David
Jennings.
Google goggles (page 8)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mushman197
0/4200068872/
Constipated face (this page)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/insightimagin
g/3586172160/
All others by Tony Hall.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to DJ Alchemi Ltd,
Fred Garnett and Lucy Johnson for
contributing to printing costs, and
to Lucy Vickery for layout assis-
tance.