Welcome to the June 2009 Update
The Policy Forest project (see blog) was developed at CAL '09 and Connected! at Staffordshire University, on June 1st thanks to Professor Mark Stiles. The Policy Forest enables participants to vote for the education and technology policy they would prefer. When presented with a choice between 11 policy statements based on existing policy, web 2.0 policy and Learner-Generated Contexts policy the results are astounding. Education professionals typically, and consistently, select 7 LGC statements 3 web 2.0 statements and only 1 from existing policy.
Why? We would argue that it is because the choices are between a managerial, a techno-centric and a learner-centric approach. Unsurprisingly education professionals favour learner-centred solutions...

Fred and Nigel presented an LGC pecha kucha session at the Teach Meet following the Channel 4 What Comes Next? event on June 30th, on Towards an Organisational Architecture of Participation, which was well received. In tribute to Mr Free Data (Sir Tim Berners-Lee) our theme was PARTICIPATION NOW!
Sorry guys we should have done more on the Open Context Model; next time?

The Open Context Model of Learning is being published this year in Australia. We will provide a reference for that.

Welcome to the November Update.
Several members of LGC are involved with the JISC online Conference "Innovating e-learning" (starting November 4th 2008) with Professor Rose Luckin giving a Keynote on "Who will drive the Learning Process?"

The group has produced a version of their Open Context Model of Learning (LGC-Open-Context-Model-ning.doc) as a book chapter which argues the case for Context Models in understanding Learning. This is an update of their Open Learn presentation (which is in draft form as a collaborative document here).

Nigel Ecclesfield and Fred Garnett have produced a Policy Forest (Policy Forest-summary-08-07.doc) which is an analysis of national e-learning policy based on Harnessing Technology and contrasting it both with a Web 2.0 approach and an LGC one. This was used to survey learning technologists on what a national strategy might be and, from 53 respondees, more than half the preferred statements were from an LGC perspective. More in the blog.

This LGC event was an experience-based event to explore the role of the physical environment on learning interactions and the role that technology might play in those interactions. We looked at different learning environments and used the facilities available in the CETL space to full advantage to explore how technology might support more productive interactions within different environments and how different environments might be better designed to support learning. We also had a group of young citizen journalists recording and reporting the event.

The questions we considered were:

What learning and teaching models are best suited to this situation?
How can we develop technologies that help learners reap the potential learning benefits in new learning environments?

See the CETL in action:

The InQbate Creativity Zone

From 1st October 2008, this Ning community site will replace all existing LGC web resources, including the following:

PBWiki

LGC Wiki