User-owned Technologies projects

User-owned technologies projects start-up meeting

April 23 2007

5 projects have been funded by the JISC eLearning capital programme to explore and develop the use of user owned technologies within education. Information on them is availabe on the JISC site.

At this meeting a set of distinctions that were proposed for idenitifying which aspects of the learning process were being addressed by individual projects. ([[Media:TSLE_slides.ppt | slides can be found here]]). These distinctions come from the Viable System Model (Beer 1979, 1981, 1985), and lead to the following questions:

Does the software help or facilitate the learner to:


 * work out and balance their commitments to their different learning activities?
 * manage or coordinate their learning activities (e.g. scheduling, planning, use common approaches to their learning?
 * monitor their learning progress/effectiveness?
 * achieve synergy between different learning activities?
 * explore potential future learning opportunities?
 * evaluate which future learning opportunities should be followed, based on their emerging aims, ambitions and sense of identity?

These questions can help projects to surface the underlying ambitions of their projects, and to identify where they fit within a learner's personal learning environment.

Projects are invited to use the discussion page to explore these ideas further.

References BEER, S. (1979) The Heart of Enterprise, Chichester, John Wiley & Sons. BEER, S. (1981) Brain of the Firm, Chichester, John Wiley & Sons. BEER, S. (1985) Designing the System for Organizations, Chichester, John Wiley & Sons.