Data, personal learning and learning analytics

This week’s topic for Stephen Downes’ E-Learning 3.0 MOOC is Data.   From the synopsis that Stephen provides for the week we read that…

…. there are two conceptual challenges associated with this topic: first, the shift in our understanding of content from documents to data; and second, the shift in our understanding of data from centralized to decentralized.

The first shift allows us to think of content – and hence, our knowledge – as dynamic, as being updated and adapted in the light of changes and events. The second allows us to think of data – and hence, of our record of that knowledge – as distributed, as being copied and shared and circulated as and when needed around the world.

To try and make sense of this topic I have watched three videos this week.

Personal Learning vs Personalized Learning: What Needs to Happen Oct 24, 2018 Online Learning 2018, Toronto, Ontario, Contact North. This special briefing explores personal learning as the future of learning, explores why it’s important, the tools which enable personal learning and the significant potential of personal learning as a key to life-long learning and the skills agenda. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVnjet3cKfU

This was the video that most resonated with me and related most to my personal interests. What I like about Stephen’s work is that he doesn’t forget to ask the question ‘why’, i.e. the ‘why’ of learning analytics for learners, rather than just the ‘what’ and ‘how’. In this video Stephen tells us that there are two approaches to learning, personalized (formal learning, which accounts for about 20% of our learning) and personal (informal learning, which accounts for the rest). This slide (7) from his presentation ( https://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?presentation=497 ) provides a clear overview of the differences.

Stephen then considered how we can support an approach which promotes personal learning through discussion of three major themes: choice, ownership and community. In this video Stephen says of learning analytics that it should be for learners so that they can track and understand their own progress. This would mean, in terms of the three major themes, that we can choose what to work on (create our own learning paths), where to store our data and what data to store; that we own all our data and have control over how it is used; and that we are free to work openly and create our own learning communities with whom we can share our data and from whom we draw support. Learning analytics will help us to keep track of our data (which will be distributed over various locations on the web) and self-monitor our personal progress. Personalized learning, whilst still useful and necessary in certain contexts, does not allow for the autonomy necessary for personal learning. The big question raised by Stephen was ‘how can we make this happen?’ i.e. how can personal learning be promoted and recognised in today’s education contexts.

AI in Education Symposium – Introduction: Oct 24, 2018 Artificial Intelligence and 21st Century Education in Ottawa, my brief introduction and posing of a problem. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WENb9N2gnpQ

In this 6-minute video, Stephen introduces the AI in Education Symposium in Toronto. He asks can AI solve the problems of society, since society has now become too complex for its problems to be solved by a few elite, privileged groups? He says that as society gets more complex it becomes increasingly difficult to govern. In the future we will need to teach each other and govern ourselves as a society. We will have to move from a society based on identity, nationalism, religion and language to a society based on consensus and collaborative decision making. The question posed was – Does AI offer us lessons into how to do this? I can see how this is related to the themes developed in the ‘Personal Learning vs Personalized Learning: What Needs to Happen’ video.

Conversation with Shelly Blake-Plock Oct 24, 2018 Week 1 of E-Learning 3.0 with Shelly Blake-Plock, Co-Founder, President and CEO – Yet Analytics. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsmdwnUwKkA

This third video was the E-Learning 3.0 MOOC course video for the week. In this conversation Shelly Blake-Plock described his work in Yet Analytics, a company which focusses exclusively on learning analytics and works with the K-12, corporate and military sectors in the US, to help improve learning content and instruction, and improve the management of data. The system they have developed for tracking learning experiences and performance is known as Experience API (xAPI). Shelly claimed that this system goes beyond how a traditional LMS is able to analyse content and activity. xAPI is able to pull data from the physical world (sensors etc.), mobile devices, games, etc. This data is stored in a secure Learning Record Store, which can then provide automated data visualisations to support learners in understanding their progress.

In watching this third video, it seemed to me that there is a mismatch between Stephen’s aspirations for learner autonomy and the learning analytics systems being developed by Yet Analytics. Questions that were asked by Stephen and others on the course, were:

• How would this work with distributed data (remembering that distributed data allows for choice, ownership and community, as well greater security)?
• Who owns the data/records?
• What are the ethical implications of these developments?
• What are the privacy and governance issues?
• How will the data tell us what learners have learned/understood, as opposed to what they have ‘done’, in terms of number of views, clicks on documents etc.

These are important questions for Yet Analytics to answer if they are really going to provide a system that goes well beyond what a traditional LMS can do and recognises a ‘personal’ learning approach to education.

Finally, as a result of watching these videos and thinking about learning analytics this week, I have wondered what might be the implications of measuring and monitoring everything we do. Is there a danger that it could be taken to excess, such that we treat our bodies like machines, become super-competitive, self-centred and self-absorbed?

Update 31-10-2018

Shelly Blake-Plock has pointed out that there are some errors in what I have written about his work, and has responded to the questions listed above. Please see his comment below.

Related blog posts

There have been some interesting posts from other course participants related to all this. See for example:

Geoff Cain – Week 0: Seimens and Downes on AI – http://geoffcain.com/blog/ai/week-0-seimens-and-downes-on-ai/

Roland Legrand – An Experience API for learning everywhere (also in virtual worlds) – https://www.mixedrealities.com/2018/10/25/an-experience-api-for-learning-everywhere-also-in-virtual-worlds/

Matthias Melcher – #EL30 Alien Intelligence AI – https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/24/el30-alien-intelligence-ai/

Laura Ritchie – #el30 Notes Week 1 – https://www.lauraritchie.com/2018/10/25/el30-notes-week-1/

#NRC01PL Personal Learning Assistants

Source of image (see Footnote)

This week I have lost my wonderful personal trainer who has been coming to me twice a week for the past three years or so. She was wonderful because in all that time no two sessions were ever exactly the same, she talked throughout the sessions making them seem like social events rather than gruelling exercise, she knew exactly what I needed to keep me fit and also what would motivate me. She personalized my fitness training. I will miss her, even though I will still have my twice weekly circuit training sessions in our village hall. I might have to step that up to three times a week. The circuit training sessions are for a group; as such they are not individualised/personalized for me.

So it has been interesting to listen to Stephen Downes and George Siemens talking about personal learning assistants this week in the Personal Learning MOOC. Stephen illustrated the idea of a digital personal learning assistant very well by showing us how he uses an online Food tracker, into which he records the details of all his food intake and his online Fitness tracker into which he records his walking and cycling sessions. The point was that these are his personal learning assistants. He can set targets for how many daily calories he will eat or how much weekly exercise he does, and by inputting his data, he will receive feedback on how well he is meeting his targets. I have to say that my immediate reaction was that I wouldn’t want to spend the time on inputting the data – and as for targets – being interested in emergent learning, targets isn’t a word I easily relate to, although I can easily relate to the idea of challenge.

Not so long ago I bought myself a Fitbit  to count my daily steps – a target driven device. My enthusiasm for it was very short-lived and I didn’t even have to enter data for that – just wear it and it recorded my steps automatically. The wonderful thing about my personal trainer was that I rarely had to provide her with any data, but I received the exact sessions and feedback I needed, there were no targets, and it felt like a social event. This aligns with Stephen’s comment that automation should take out the drudgery.

Stephen and George discussed what automation of personal learning should and shouldn’t do (see the video). Automation should not only remove the drudgery of tasks (for me that would include inputting data!) but also enable choice, honour autonomy, respect human agency, provide appropriate support and most importantly provide feedback. Basically we are talking about what good teachers have always done. This is what my personal trainer did for me. She planned my training sessions, but I was always able to say to her ‘No, I don’t want to, or I am not able to do that today’ and then she would modify the activity. She listened and her plans were highly adaptable. She always left me with next steps, but it was up to me whether I took those steps and she never judged me if I didn’t.

But my personal trainer was not an automaton. I learned as much about her as she did about me and whilst I learned a lot from her, I know that she also learned from me. Could this be the case for a digital personal trainer? Yes I expect so, but my gut feeling tells me that now that I have ‘lost’ her, (she has moved on in her life and I am pleased for her) I don’t think she could be replaced by a machine.

Meanwhile research seems to be turning towards investigating what aspects of a teacher’s role could be automated. See for example:

Bayne, S. (2015). Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4), 455–467. doi:10.1080/13562517.2015.1020783 – http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13562517.2015.1020783

and

Lim, S. L., & Goh, O. S. (2016). Intelligent Conversational Bot for Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). doi:10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004 – http://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.07065v1.pdf

And at the end of his talk with Stephen, George said that he thought that those working on developing machine learning will be the ones to become wealthy in the future, which for some reason at this point in time feels a bit depressing, but hopefully won’t be so.

Footnote

A few years ago, whilst working as a consultant for the University of Birmingham, I saw these robots (the ones in the first image in this post) being used to support children on the autism spectrum in a forward thinking Birmingham school. Research into this programme showed that these children were able to relate to these robots and that the robots helped them develop their communication skills.

Further resources related to Week 6 in the Personal Learning MOOC

Levy, D. M. (2007). No Time to Think. Ethics & Information Technology, 9(4), 1–24. doi:10.1007/s10676 – http://faculty.washington.edu/dmlevy/Levy_No_Time_to_Think.pdf

Halevy, A., Norvig, P., & Pereira, F. (2009). The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 24(2), 8–12. doi:10.1109/MIS.2009.36 – http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/35179.pdf 

 

#NRC01PL – What does personal learning mean to me?

This is the question we have been asked to respond to in Week 4 of the Personal Learning MOOC (#NRC01PL). This is a quick response.

The word that immediately came into my mind in response to this question was ‘Freedom’. Freedom to decide whether or not I want to answer that question; where, how and when I want to answer that question. In other words, freedom to learn when, where, how, and with whom I want to. Of course I know that that is a bit of a utopian view. There will be elements of my PLE which may not offer me unlimited freedom. For example, if part of my PLE is a learning management system (LMS), then I will experience constraints within that system, but ideally it will have been my choice to have an LMS within my PLE.

Perhaps autonomy is a better word, or perhaps autonomy is a result of freedom.

So I have decided to answer that question here on my blog. I saw it first on the EdX course site, then on Facebook. I wondered whether it would make a good Twitter chat. It probably would – but I don’t want to do that. That’s what personal means. I can choose.

To choose I don’t have to be super tech saavy. I am not a technologist. I am not even particularly interested in technology. I have a fairly standard set of tools that I use all the time. These are – in no particular order

• Email: I use this a lot but I am not overwhelmed by it
• WordPress: My blog is where I feel at home online
• Twitter: I use Tweetdeck to follow Twitter streams and private messaging
• Facebook: I really don’t like Facebook, but it’s the only way to keep in touch with some long-term distant friends
• Flickr: I am not interested in the Flickr game of promoting photos by commenting on everyone else’s. I use it as a personal photo back up store
• LinkedIn: Only for professional contact and sharing my CV
• PbWiki: I have lots of wikis, but only for invited people, so not public. Wikis are where I do all my research work
• Pinterest: This is a very recent addition to my PLE and only because I have started art classes so it’s a good way of collecting images of art from the artists mentioned in the class
• Mendeley: I couldn’t manage without this for my research. I have a huge library of papers
• Evernote: As above. I have collected a whole library of links useful for my research
• Youtube: I create Youtube videos because that’s the only way I know of getting an embed code for my blog and also because for work purposes it is quite easy to privately share videos.
• Google+: I only use this to share blog posts. I do not interact there. I don’t find Google+ intuitive. It reminds me of my reaction to Elgg. I always feel lost in it.

These are the tools that currently make up my personal learning environment. But personal learning for me is a lot more than online environments. A lot of my personal learning is not public. Privacy and solitude are extremely important to me. So a lot of my learning really is personal. i.e. for my eyes only, or only for the eyes of very close and trusted friends/colleagues. Ironically some of those friends are online friends who I have never met face-to-face and others are friends/colleagues who I do not interact with online.

So what does personal learning mean to me? It’s complex – and personal!

#NRC01PL Personal Learning MOOC Week 3

There have been a few interesting goings on in the open ‘Personal Learning Conversation’ that Stephen Downes is running. I don’t get the sense that this is a MOOC, i.e. I don’t see a lot of evidence of more than 150 people being actively engaged, but there could be a lot going on behind the scenes that I am not aware of, and since I haven’t been very active myself, there could be a lot going on visibly that I am not aware of.

The Open EdX site went down at the beginning of the week, which I haven’t missed and nicely makes the case for distributed learning and learners having a distributed personal learning network to call on. But I wonder how many people who signed up were relying solely on the EdX site for interaction and resources and I wonder what the impact of the EdX site going down has been on the numbers of people following the ‘conversation’. I think it is fairly well established now that what might start as a MOOC often ends up as a small group. Unfortunately diversity, one of the key principles of the original cMOOCs is then lost.

But for me – it’s all fine, because at the moment I can’t devote my full attention to the course, so I am more of a ‘window shopper’ and ‘sampler’ – two of the labels which have been used to define MOOC groups by some researchers.

Most interesting for me this week have been two videos by Stephen and an aggregation tool that is new to me that is being used by Vanessa Vaile and Matthias Melcher. See http://www.inoreader.com/bundle/0014cd637821 for Matthias and http://www.inoreader.com/bundle/0014cd6377fa for Vanessa.

The video that I most enjoyed from Stephen was not created for this course, but for a talk that he was giving in Istanbul bearing the title The Future of educational media

In this he responded to Contact North’s ideas about the Future of Online Learning, expanding on the ideas and saying where he agreed and disagreed.

A 2016 Look at the Future of Online Learning – Part 1

These ideas related to

• Machine learning and artificial intelligence
• Handheld and mobile computing
• Learning Analytics
• Internet of things
• Games – simulations and virtual reality
• Translation and collaborative technology

Stephen said that his own ideas about the Future of Educational Media are based on his own ‘inflexible law of learning’ , which he explains as

‘We have to do things to learn. We can do things now with the internet that we could not before. It’s when we do stuff that we learn, not when stuff does something for us’.

These statements form the foundation of his ideas about personal and personalized learning. In personalized learning something is done for you, you are given the content. In personal learning you do something for yourself, learning is driven by what the learner wants and needs. Here is a really good slide explaining the difference.

Source of image – Slide 14

In terms of this view of personal learning, learning becomes context sensitive to me, my needs and interests. I want to be there. I am free to leave if I wish. Assessment will then be a recognition process not a standards-based process. We will be recognised for our performance.

There was a lot more in the talk, which I don’t have time to go into here, but one final important take away for me that really resonates with my own thinking was:

Learning happens in the cracks between everything else that is going on in formal education systems, so we have to make sure that those cracks/spaces are there.

The second video that I enjoyed was The MOOC Ecosystem in which Stephen takes us from meso to macro and back to micro views of the MOOC ecosystem. I think I have seen this video, or something like it presented before, but it was good to be reminded of it.

Final Note: In the absence of the Open EdX site Fredrik Graver  has set us a Google+ group –

https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/111887320512221682950

which is a great help in following what is going on

– and of course there is Twitter #NRC01PL 

#NRC01PL Personal Learning MOOC Week 1

I have registered for Stephen Downes’ 7 week Personal Learning MOOC – Here is the text, advertising the course, from the first part of Stephen Downes’ Half an Hour blog.

This course explores the topic of learning in three ways: first, through an examination of research and development issues related to the topic; second, through interaction with a personal learning environment (specifically: LPSS) to take the course; and third, through activities supporting the development of a personal learning environment at a conceptual level.

Course objectives: participants will develop an appreciation of different models of online course delivery, ranging from the traditional LMS through connectivist MOOCs to potential future models of personal learning and performance support.

Course environment: NRC01 Personal Learning will be delivered using OpenEdX and will include text-based content, videos, discussion, and exercises. Participants will be also invited to explore additional learning environments, including the gRSShopper, LPSS.me and Arke prototypes developed by NRC. In addition, participants will be encouraged to explore and work in online environments related to the topics covered in the course and report their findings in the discussion area or their own website. Participants may also be subscribed to a daily newsletter for the duration of the course.

Course Tag: #NRC01PL

Course Registration: https://openedx.lpss.me

Week 1 is coming to a close and has been simply an introduction to the EdX environment. This is the first time I have participated in an EdX course. We have been asked to comment on the environment in terms of ease of use. Yes, it is easy to use, but I did need Stephen’s video to ‘open my eyes’ to a few things. I am not interested in technology for technology’s sake, so I don’t naturally click every button to find out what’s what. For me, a short video pointing me in the right direction always helps. So for example, I ignored the tab ‘Courseware’ because it sounds like ‘software’ and I incorrectly thought ‘that’s not for me’. But in fact the Courseware tab is where the course content is – including the video (a further layer down), whereas I was expecting it to be in Course Info and was wondering where the course content was. I wasn’t worried, because I have participated in enough online learning and MOOCs to know that I would find it on Twitter or via the Daily Newsletter, or via a participant.

I think if I had designed the site I might have had a Home page link above the Week 1 ‘Learning through Practice’ link and had the video there and immediately visible. I would also have the links in a different colour, so that they can be easily identified as live links – but that’s just me.

Otherwise the site is very easy. Some people have questioned the day by day drip feed approach, but it’s fine by me. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly I get a sense of feeling overwhelmed. I haven’t even managed to watch the three videos mentioned on OLDaily yet . Here are the links below.

Beyond Instructional Design: Open Spaces and Learning Places

The MOOC Ecosystem

Design Elements in a Personal Learning Environment

….. or read the recommended article

Downes, S. (2001) Learning Objects: Resources for distance education worldwide. 2(1) IRRODL

although I have read Stephen’s helpful blog post – Personal and Personalized Learning

There are just not enough hours in the day at the moment. But again, I am not worried about this and I’m certainly not rushing around from city to city like Stephen himself is doing. I’ll just pick and choose, as and when. I know that this MOOC is really for research purposes (the first survey has already been conducted and the results posted Personal Learning MOOC Survey 1) but my interest is to see what I can learn about recent developments in how learners experience and manage their own online learning spaces. I’m not sure how active I’ll be, but I’ll be tagging along.

One final thing about the Edx Environment – and this is a personal observation. Although it’s very straightforward to use, I found myself immediately wanting some more colour, i.e. I wanted it to be more aesthetically pleasing. Perhaps we’re not supposed to be attracted to it, and we’ll be encouraged to move somewhere else. Time will tell!

Beyond Institutions – Personal Learning in a Networked World

This was Stephen Downes’ second talk in a series of 3, which he is giving in London this week. This is how he introduced it on his blog Stephen’s Web 

In this presentation I look at the needs and demands of people seeking learning with the models and designs offered by traditional institutions, and in the spirit of reclaiming learning describe a new network-based system of education with the learner managing his or her education.

Although I have only listened to the recording of this talk, I found it more interesting than the first talk, which I listened to live, having been a delegate at the conference, although there was plenty of interest in that one too. What I like about Stephen’s talks is that he doesn’t pull any punches. He always challenges my thinking.

The thrust of this talk, from my perception, is, as the title suggests, that learning is no longer in the control of institutions, but increasingly personal and in the control of learners as they occupy a networked world. There is a distinction between personal learning and personalized learning. Institutions don’t understand personal learning because personal learning has to be in the control of the learner. It is made to order. Learning is built not from a kit but from scratch. Institutions think they are catering for personal learning, but in fact are offering personalized learning – which is ‘off the shelf’ learning; one package with a bunch of options.

There is evidence that today’s students are demanding change and want more control. Learning is no longer about remembering. The content, nature and means of learning are changing on a daily basis. Learning today is more about play and socializing. Lecturing is also changing. Lecturing today is not so much about content as creating the potential for dialogue.

A particularly challenging point that Stephen made was ‘Do away with models’ – learning models and design models.  The right model is no model. New versions of old models don’t produce results. It is obvious that people learn differently, have different objectives, priorities, goals and times when they want to learn, but if you use a learning model you are attempting to predefine the outcome, whereas learning should be about discovery and exploration. I would also say from the work I have done with Roy Williams, that we need to recognize that  learning will often be unpredictable and emergent. (See Emergent learning and learning ecologies in Web 2.0)

Autonomy rather than control is the essential in education. Autonomy does not mean no structure, it means choice of structure. Personal learning is based on self-organization and self-organizing networks. Learners need to reclaim management and organization of learning. The way forward will be for students/learners to have their own personal web server and run their own web services from their own home networks.  The University will be a box in your living room. Learning should be cooperative and networked. It is not content that is important, but the making of connections. Learners need networking skills.

What do we need from institutions?

We do not need

• more models, more designs
• more learning theories
• more standards, measurement and centralization
• more control
• more of making the same mistakes

We do need mechanisms to support people in learning and bettering their lives. Institutions need to think in terms of serving many different people in many different ways and supporting personal learning, rather than attempting to control and personalize learning.

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And here is an interesting blog post about this talk by Sonja Grussendorf – Beyond institutions: Stephen Downes at NetworkEDGE

See also Arun Karnad’s post:

[View the story “LSE NetworkEdge: Stephen Downes” on Storify]

Knowledge, Learning and Community: Elements of Effective Learning

This is the title of Stephen Downes’ presentation to Week 25 of ChangeMooc

Here is the link to a Recording of the session

Also here: Slides, audio and Elluminate video recording

My notes from the session

What is knowledge? It is not memory. It is not facts or laws, which are slippery. It is not in the network. It IS the network, the recognition of the emergence of patterns. We are recognising beings. Knowing is NOT being able to NOT recognise (the double negative is important).

Emergence is how we see patterns of connectivity, how we recognise patterns as something,

Patterns form in different ways, e.g. Hebbian Associationism (based on concurrency), Back Propagation (based on desired outcome), Boltzman (based on ‘settling’ , annealing). Experience results in forming and breaking connections.

Meaning is contained within the mind itself. We cannot tie meaning to what it directly represents. The external referent is not important. It’s what is in our own mind that is important.

Theorists confuse public and personal knowledge. Personal knowledge is in our own mind. Public knowledge is out there in artefacts. They are different. There is no transformation from one to the other.

Knowledge is the organisation of connections in networks.

If a human mind can come to ‘know’, and if a human mind is essentially a network, then any network can come to ‘know’, and for that matter so can society. (Slide 13)

04-03-12 Correction: The comment from Matthias Melcher below has prompted me to listen to the recording of the session and present this more accurately. This is what Stephen said in the session about personal and public knowledge.

Knowledge is the organisation of a set of connections in a network. It follows directly that if there are different kinds of networks there are different kinds of knowledge. There are two distinct kinds of knowledge (but not only two kinds). Our personal knowledge is the organisation of the set of connections in our own mind. Public knowledge is the organisation of all the artifacts in society. The organisation of society is not the same as the organisation of a personal mind.

What is learning? Learning is to practice and reflect (teaching is to model and demonstrate). We can only create an environment in which learning can occur. For personal learning we use the social network (physical) to create neuronal connections (personal).

Developing personal knowledge is more like exercising than like inputting, absorbing or remembering (Slide 17)

We recognise neural connections by performance in the environment/network. A personal learning environment is one in which we immerse ourselves into the workings of a community. Learning is ‘being’ in an environment.

What is community?  We don’t need a personal learning environment to engage with the community. We do not need to all do things the same way. The main thing is that we are connected. Knowledge emerges from the set of connections between us. Groups work on the premise of collaboration and sameness, but networks and community work on the premise of cooperation and connection.

Networks work on the basis of four basic principles – autonomy, diversity, openness and interaction. Without these, the network will stagnate and die.

What stood out for me? One thing Stephen said really jumped out at me.

Learning is becoming more and more like the person who is doing the teaching.

I think I must have misunderstood the intention behind this statement, as on one level I find it disturbing – and on another just completely counter to my own experience.

As a teacher, I want learners to develop their own identities. The last thing I want is for them to turn out like me! Whilst some learners will choose to model themselves on their teachers, many others will make a conscious choice to be as unlike their teacher as possible. The issue is surely more about how learners develop and recognize their own identities than becoming like the person who is doing the teaching?

04-03-12 Clarification: Again, in response to Matthias Melcher’s comment  here is a bit more about what Stephen said in the session:

A person who practices in the environment is going to come to be like the person who is doing the teaching.  The person who is teaching is not presenting simply facts but presenting an entire way of being. The person who is learning is watching this and attempting to replicate it.

04-03-12 Further comment from me. I am aware that there is some risk in sharing my notes. They will be read ‘out of context’ and obviously interpreted according to the personal perceptions of the reader in their context and I am not and never will be ‘infallible’ in my interpretations. Stephen himself has said that he knows that his writing and presentations are likely to be misinterpreted however careful he is with his use of words.

I was also reminded during this presentation of a comment made in the most recent Networked Learning Hotseat  about how ‘we notice things when we are ready’.  I have heard Stephen talk about some of these ideas a few times before, but this time I noticed things I haven’t noticed before  – must be patterns emerging?