Some years ago I wrote book reviews for FirstMonday and I’ve just had cause to try to find one of them (to give someone the link). Rather than searching the archives again I’ve decided to put links on here so that I know where they are in future.

Just thought I’d tie up a hectic week and try to tease out some thoughts.

Tuesday was talking to prison staff at HMP/YOI Rochester (the original Borstal) and on Thursday I attended an OU degree ceremony in a prison. This was a very moving event. We recognised the achievements of a number of prisoners including one who had earned a degree.

Of the many thousands of people in prison in this country only a few hundred will never be released, the rest will eventually have to find a way of surviving in a world which has moved on. And this raises an important question. What is the value of education in this context?

The audit commission report last year stated that the cost of prison education is £110M each year. Only a very small proportion of this goes on higher education, the bulk is on lower level skills and training including basic numeracy and literacy. Yet there doesn’t appear to be any coherent research on the value of education on reoffending. The question then, put simply, is “Does education help to reduce reoffending?”. There are some high profile success stories -Bobby Cummines attributes his transformation from one of the most disruptive prisoners in the system to founding “Unlock” to his Open University studies on release from prison. Eric Allinson spent much of his life in prison and now writes for The Guardian – he’s a passionate advocate of education in prison and recently wrote about the difficulties offenders still face while studying in prison. His piece and others reflect what we believe to be the value of offender learning but can we quantify this value? The government’s education policy is predicated on the presumption that a better qualified workforce will lead to an improved economy, and has been for many years, but does this hold true for offenders?

I’m still thinking about a research degree and this is the kind of area that I’m finding increasingly interesting. More to follow?

The video from the BBC battery piece

This piece is from the BBC but The Register suggests that it’s jumping the gun!

This is developed from the presentation below. I’ve converted it to a video for use at a conference that I can’t attend – why should they escape just because I can’t be there?!

Back from the SociaLearn conference at Horwood House, Bucks. I’ve mentioned the conference in an earlier post but in case you missed it the public-facing blurb is available on the SociaLearn site and that also gives an overview of the project. Jo has also covered the initial premise on her blog posting (which has just popped up while I was writing this)

The whole event was fascinating and an opportunity to share space with some really imaginative, smart, intelligent, bright, awesomely clever and switched-on people. Jo mentioned the backchannel and I think that’s also the main thing which struck me.

We’d been invited to take laptops and PDAs and there is a (closed) Ning community for catching and discussing ideas. Some of us were also using Twitter and Purk to bash around and develop thoughts – a commentary on the event which was building and scaffolding understanding about how we might do things and where we might take them. And all those thoughts were captured for later analysis and development or restructuring and reassessment – and, to me, that’s part of what using web technologies to support learning should be about. Attending a presentation where I can quickly run a search on an author the presenter has mentioned, bookmark a couple of papers and, perhaps, speed-read a blog piece which outlines their work is my idea of how things should work. Seeing responses to a presentation as it’s happening, watching the shape of people’s ideas while they are sparking off each other, being an active participant rather than a passive observer – that’s all very powerful stuff and even if we can’t make every learning experience like that then we can certainly replicate parts of it by finding ways of introducing learners to these communities of practice.

That’s how I see SociaLearn “adding value”, it’s an opportunity to plug into these roving groups of people with common interests. It breaks away from the formality of tutor group-based conferences and allows students to find groups with which they feel comfortable. Maybe these groups are moving at a different pace or in a slightly different direction but groups can form, work together for a short period and then break up as a different subject group is coalescing. Web 2.0 SNS tools allow for these loose, informal, groupings and learning doesn’t occur in lumps of a given size (see Weller slide 10) and students are rarely working at the same pace and the current OU practice supports the 80% in the middle of the train but the 10% sprinting ahead and the 10% struggling along at the back tend to be alone. If we have a series of groups and students are shown how to move between groups or to straddle a few groups they can find what they need when they need it – peer-supported student-centered learning perhaps?

I need to spend more time structuring these ideas but I also have to write a profile for the PET web site, iron some shirts and clear out the fridge tonight so I’m going to post and revisit another day.

NB Some slides difficult to understand because of the loss of animations. I’ll edit and re upload when time allows