From: "Cowan, John" <[email protected]>
To: norman jackson <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, 12 March 2012, 21:49
Subject: RE: A bit of action research
Dear Norman
I'm not sure about how this is heading. That does not mean, as the comment from me so often does, that I think it's heading for the wrong target. Just that I'd yearn to see a bit more focussing on objective self-evaluation.
The stories, blogs and so on are, of course, important. But they are important as raw material sources from which I assemble my objective self-evaluation.
From: norman jackson [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Fri 02/03/2012 10:38
To: Cowan, John
Subject: A bit of action research
Dear John
I am conscious that in creating the accreditation scheme we are going to need the on-line infrastructure to enable us to engage with learners and check their development plans, their commitment to utilising their everyday experiences for learning and their claims for personal development.
Realistically, the only way that we can achieve this is to encourage participants to create their own virtual environment through which they can reveal their commitment to learning through their life experiences. In fact the creation of a personalised on-line learning and development environment might be one of the concrete expressions of this process.
A few weeks ago I was introduced to 'Weebly' by my son and I decided to set up my own web site. I have wanted to do this for a long time but lack the programming skills but things have moved on so much in the web 2.0 world that Weebly have this wonderful set of drag and drop tools. Take a look for yourself www.weebly.com Its wonderfully simple and free if you don't put lots of media into it. In the end I decided to go for the pro-version at £44 for 2 years to cover the hosting so I can put lots of media into it.
I have set up my website which is public http://www.normanjackson.co.uk/ to tell the story of my lifelong journey and lifewide activity (the main spaces I occupy on a daily basis). This is intended to provide the context for demonstrating my current situations for learning and developing against a 'personal development activity and action plan' which you will find in my blog.
I have begun to create a 'blog' which is private through which I will try to demonstrate my ongoing activity. Its password protected (password - manunited).
I would like you to take a look at it with a view to evaluating whether it is the sort of approach that we could adopt as an underpinning technology for the scheme. It would have to enable an accreditor/coach to:
1) appreciate the individual's contexts for lifewide learning (their lifewide activity)
2) audit an individual's stories about their own learning and development over time (their blog)
3) engage in a formative conversations with the learner through the comments facility on the blog
4) ultimately be able to 'accredit' the person as a 'lifewide learner'
So in looking at this you might imagine the procedural framework within which this might operate and the sort of criteria that might be used for form judgements about the learners engagement, self-awareness and demonstration of development.
cheers
norman