Brazilian Job

I was pleased to learn about Participatory Budgeting (PB) a practice which originated in Brazil in Porto Alegre where it now covers 18% of public spending. I like to visualise this legacy to the world of public service accounting (1200 cities are now using it worldwide) on the list of Brazilian exports alongside less substantial items. (you can google those)

PB is when the citizens get a direct say in small and usually tokenist portions of public spend. This changes the dynamic between the governors and the governed. That’s good especially where officials are corrupt or out of touch. Having sat through parish budget committees in the UK however, I think it's gonna change very little in the UK.

Horsesmouth chomps at the bit

MT Rainey the founder of Horsesmouth should be stamping her feet (although she’s too well mannered) at the failure of education and learning to pick up her brilliant online advice and mentoring community platform.



I often cite Horsesmouth in my presentations as the best example of a web learning community that thrives without the backing of any learning institution. So it’s nice to meet the face behind it.

MT’s confidential and voluntary mentoring and advice brokering engine has fabulous web 2.0 quality indicators. Average dwell time 8 mins and 15 page views/visit shows this is a place people really want to stay tuned. The lemmings of online help should go green with envy. Average 20 written replies within one day to any “call for help” posting is something Yahoo! answers would die for and those speculative mercenaries at e-how should hang their heads in shame. NHS Online can also eat its heart out. 84% of MT’s pages contain deep links to sources of help, advice and support – and those are provided by the public, not by the public service managers.

Presenting at MPS09, MT (MaryTheresa for connoisseurs of unusual first names) talked about how all the time and investment had gone into the reputation, security, moderating, integrity of the service. To ensure that the transactions are as deep and honest as possible. This is the opposite of the Social Network business model – where you invest everything in expansion and the quality net is the lowest you can get away with.

How do we get resources and partnerships into this fantastic channel ? MT and I brainstormed a few ideas later over the home-made cakes. How about an accredited mentoring activity as an in-service training element for one of the caring professions ?

Later I read that the Government wants to launch a new Royal College of Social Work on the lines of the RCN. Hey, they actually have it already made. Just take some walled space on a hosted segment of Horsesmouth. Most betters would wager they will actually spend half a billion and ten years, so that a minister can cut a ribbon. But if the spirit of this conference prevails, you never know, this might be the place you heard it first from the Horse's Mouth

Direct Action reborn

ThinkPublic did a session at the MPS09 meeting– they are one of the organisers – about their work using the kind of 2-way participative interactions the web has created, to re-design services. It’s not necessarily a question of using the web – just of modelling its kind of conversations. Sometimes you see the principles of web 2.0 projected back into face to face situations.

Their take is that re-design by participation is more powerful than re-design through reports, consultation, analysis, synthesis and any kind of management planning. Looks convincing when you see projects like early-stage Alzheimer patients working with late-stage patients to re-design dementia services. Interesting that in general this kind of participative planning has little place for written word, and works better through video communication or direct action. When they had the brief to redesign hospital waiting areas, they got the patients to do it themselves even down to shifting the chairs around.




The ThinkPublic spin is that this approach not only delivers better service designs, but (more significantly) changes us from consumers of public services to owners. Transactions with a service like Health, in this approach, are not moments when we take goods and deplete the cupboard. They are moments when we share the benefit of our experience and re-invest it. This puts the direct action back into the internet in a more fundamental and creative way than say Carrotmob, which is simply using the web as a better mailing system to trigger real world direct actions.

Real cakes and social media reporters

Two things really engage me about this conference, which massively build its community impact
1. A community approach to catering. There’s a gift economy around cakes and biscuits. Delegates were asked to bake and bring. Some gluten free, super brownies, great to celebrate attendees ability to be creative and have a home hinterland. I felt so caked-out I had to run for 30 minutes to feel normal appetite.
2. Big emphasis on real-time social reporting. I’m also here as a social blogger along with a posse of twitterers, podcasters, video shooters, picture snappers, social bookmarkers. Despite a slow wifi at the Abbey Centre, there’s a useful and genuinely valuable stream of content and reflection emanating out from this event into the cloud. It amplifies the response and gets the process of reflection intensified. Read the collected twitterstream. And then compare it to the BBC's report on the event. I think I know which is more useful if you want to put the conference themes into action

Now this homemade cakes and is social reporting lark is fun, and I hope it’s gonna be a trend in 2010. Watch out for the pioneer who’s making this social reporting a profession - the delightful David Wilcox, part of today’s posse, who turns out film, boos, podcasts, blogs and microblogs all day long.


But the worry about the social reporting is that it might be used to head off the increasingly common scenario of microbloggers operating as an unlicensed fourth estate during events – and often undermining a meeting’s purpose. I’ve heard of many keynote speeches where the real time twitter backchannel is an anarchic and sometimes disfunctional real time ratings system that verges on mob rule. (Example here) Organisers who are worried by this (or who are simply paranoid) should co-opt their audience as social reporters in the way that My Public Services conference showed how. But reporters have to be free to vent contrary and vexatious opinions too. The #MPS09 stream was uniformly positive, engaged and supportive – because the conference was all of these things. But I can’t help worrying that it won’t be long until we see the manipulation of this new form of media coverage by organisers who see its potential to brainwash their audiences.

Public Service and the Web

My Public Services Conference

"Stories can change the world" is the maxim. Check it here.

A one-day London gathering to reimagine public services, especially health, in the light of the web’s abundance of information, contact, choice.

This is a transformationist agenda: they want us to imagine how choosing can help to create change and improvement. Not just give the chooser an advantage for themselves

The premise: the tools now available for managing the interface of consumer and provider are so utterly different from what we have had, that we should re-design the entire system. Don’t copy the old models and just digitise them. We are working with new materials.

This analogy from organiser James Munro:

Ironbridge by Telford the first ever iron construction. It was built using carpentry techniques, jointing and pinioning as for wood. Yet the material allows entirely different possibilities. We need to avoid making this mistake for public service delivery now that the web is here.

Questions for our age in online delivery of Government:

• Why do we have centralised departments (to locate files in)
• Why do we have queues ? (because expertise is concentrated)

Probably none of this is necessary now

Tom Loosemore of 4ip

Tom says that Govt’s first job on the internet is to stop running websites. They are not good enough for the cost. Big public organisations are bad web publishers. BBC.co.uk is poor value for money. When Tom ran all the bbc's community outlets, he shut them down. They weren't listening. The conversations were happening elsewhere, and the BBC wasn't going to be the place they were taking place. In fact, hosting those community conversations was just trouble: defamation etc... When NHS hosts conversations about health services, you know it is going to be following a corrupt editorial policy and not be transparent about it. The fifth estate (the web) has to hold power to account.

Government should be publishing information and keeping it up to date. Other people should be using it to create services and interfaces.

How to use online absence ?

The Manitoba Emerging Technologies - Africa online course is focussing increasingly on participation. What does it mean to participate in a global online course where many of the students have real difficulties in getting online, and getting bandwidth.

It was a student based in West Africa who had the courage to first raise the question - why is there so little participation in the forums ? At first sight the issue can look like a purely tech/bandwidth one. No access = no voice.

Thinking about this, another student with good connectivity has has said that what keeps her out is more social factors. Time, opportunity, and a preference to engage as a reader not a contributor make her a quiet voice.

With online social networks we all bring perhaps a set of confused and emergent expectations which are still grounded in the social conventions of the real world gathering . So, a student may be on the network, or has joined the course, with the explicit expectation of a certain level of participation from others. This student is puzzled not to see a mirroring engagement from others, who have nevertheless declared their participation. Whereas if we'd all gone to a lecture room and some people at the back are simply taking notes not asking questions, everyone can be very cool about it...

Are we all perhaps unskilled (as yet) in interpreting and giving the subtler social signals online ? To join when "convenient/possible" and mostly through reading is of course a crucial function. The person who exercises that role should be proud to do so. Groups need critical and externalised consumers who can assess the value in the wider context, and not be seduced by their own voice and their own conversations. The challenge for us all in any online world is: how is the online group going to feel the benefit of these critical readings....and how are we going to feel the social signals that someone who is in a mode of "convenient/possible" and "read-only" is nevertheless wholly engaged with the learning ?

Online lacks a way for everyone can see the mental connections that others are making even if they are unable/not disposed to start writing in moodle forums.

For learners located on the wrong side of the digital divide, the question is crucial and touches on entitlement and equity. They are going to operate in an environment where connection and online presence are not easy and not regular. So they have to be able to signal their mental engagement by some other means - if they are not to appear, and to feel, to be excluded.

Conservative backlash against online learning

Onetime leftie Frank Furedi is writing today the predictably vexatious and stuffy online rag Spiked! The man is recently striking the pose of an arch reactionary on education (See Wasted etc) - and now he's laying into the young generation of "digital natives" who use the web to educate and broaden themselves in ways that traditional top-down education never permitted or imagined.

Furedi's been moaning about education in general for a long time, and now wants land a hit on digital learning. This is how he headlines his sentimental thesis

Let’s give children the ‘store of human knowledge' !

In flattering kids as ‘digital natives’ for whom the past is irrelevant, we degrade a vital adult mission: transmitting knowledge.

Come on Frank, this is drivel and you know it. Digital Natives may well care as much or more about the past as the mythical chalky old profs you nostalgically evoke. Online kids certainly chew over the past in many more ways than you'd imagine, and not just through games. Look at one normal school history site and I guarantee you'll be astonished by the high quality of analysis and thought that every school kid now can and does access. (Example here)

And anyway on what rational grounds can we say that knowledge of the past is more crucial than knowledge of the present ? All human eras are well larded with bunkum. At least the digital world programmes its natives to question what they read, seek out contrary opinions, and resist the channeling of their mind by the most immediate sources of authority.

If you wish to expose the links between "digitally driven society" and "present educational fads", Frank, that's wonderful. I'm ready to listen. There is plenty of digital garbage masquerading as education. Most of it produced in fact by respectable publishing conglomerates. Please get on and lay into it.

But cut the misty-eyed sentiment. The digital genie will not go back into its bottle and grateful youths will not start to sit at the knees of the elders, intently absorbing every word.

You also say that modern schooling has lost touch with basic fundamentals of education, such as subject based knowledge or theory. You say "Curriculum engineers often display indifference, if not contempt, for abstract thought".

Sorry, but your prejudices are running ahead of your knowledge.

Look at the case of science. You probably got taught a lot of stuff about periodic tables and newtonian theory etc. (So did I btw). Now look at what 15 year olds do in the Twenty First Century Science curriculum developed by the University of York. Go here and see the enormously challenging mix of theory, abstract reasoning, empirical knowledge, and data-handling skills that are required. This rich synthesis is exactly what the digital generation excels at. It is building citizens who are scientifically literate. It's miles better than the dry and inherited school science you and I learned.

So Frank please do better than this. I welcome you writing about digital natives it's an important theme and the networked information age does create problems for learning, that is sure. We need intelligent people like you to stop being lazy luddites and to start writing properly informed critiques.

Personal Learning Environments compared

As part of attending the University of Manitoba course on Educational Technologies in Africa I've had to take a look at Personal Learning Environments.

George Siemens the tutor asks for us to sketch our own but I found it more interesting to look at the PLE of Abdou Makayang, the 16 year old student I met in Gambia and whose final two years of High School I have agreed to pay for (£75 the notional price of education ending at 16 vs. 18). And to contrast it with the PLE of my own son Remy, 14.

The two slides are here

PLEs Africa and Europe compared

View more presentations from stephendhaggard.

BBCrap

Roll up Roll up for the online horror of the year.

The BBC has rebuilt and redesigned its cbeebies site for under-10 kids. What was a site that gave 3 year olds complete web mastery is now impossible to navigate, poorly designed, and mostly broke.

Yes it looks pretty.

But it's organised by categories that are meaningless to children.

They used to be able to select a character and then find all the activities they wished under that person/toy/animal. Perfect. That's how small minds work.

Now they have to identify first what output mode of production they want (stories, games, painting etc) and then they can select the character. Small kids don't work like this. They are multitaskers and their motivation for a character can and should drive them to experiment in all kinds of output modes.

The page of characters (now called "shows") organises them by alphabet in such a way that you can only ever see a dozen at a time. Gone is the miraculous gallery of friends that you could recognise and click to. Instead, get literate and get spelling. Navigate six pages of names, or scroll down a master-sheet of all characters that is three pages long.

The home page does offer "picks" - what they'd like to recommend your kids to do. (That's what the BBC means by choice !). But these choices are below the fold so unless your kid knows how to scroll down, they will never want to discover anything.

The old site was a treasure trove. This is blah and unworkable. I predict the children and their parents will drift away and stay away in their droves from what has hitherto been one of the best and most popular sites in the world.

BBCrap

Language and Technology

To SOAS for a conference on technology and language learning run by its CETL. Programme is HERE. Astonishingly for a technology conference, no wifi allowed so no communication from the inside. Ah well, at least got some proposals written in the boring sessions (there were a few)

What the academic speakers don't get, is that this field is about dynamism, energy, initiative and taking part. I heard at least three funeral orations, I am sure.

Honourable exception: Graham Davies. A consultant well past retirement (by his own confession) who is more energised and participative than all the post-doc whippersnappers put together. Check him out, and his language lab at Edunation in second life. He goes by the name of Groovy Winkler and Second Lifers would do well to befriend him and get the tour. A gripping use of the Startrek concept of the holodeck, to beam the language learners into every conceivable setting and really stretch their social and metalinguistic powers. Bravo EU for supporting this guy.

Saw a demo of a videoconference-linked joint class format between Aberystwyth (Wales) and Masaryk (Czech Rep). The setting means that the learners are also picking up mediation, film use, technology... as they learn language. The Welsh group is mostly Asian and exposes the Czech learners to different accents. The Wales learners are doing a foundation access course and come out with social confidence as well as English. Some slides here

How to get 15 mins to catch up with work

Headphones and a kiddy download to itunes create the small space necessary to deal with something right now.

Says it all

Thanks to Iain Tait for finding this. Follow him www.crackunit.com