Lee and Tom

Lee Hardman and Tom Mannering (shown in the photo Tom left Lee right) recently led two focus groups of Year 11s who identified themselves as chavs. This was the 16th and final Aimhigher-funded cohort. Lee and Tom will be the faces on forthcoming leaflets too.

Emerge

Last week was rather dominated by a trip down to London for the first Emerge seminar. Lots of good info and some very good potential contacts. It's back to reality this week.

Virtual world activity

We've had a pleasant small break from Communities of Development and Web2.0 this week when a new partner school asked for a 'general' activity in a virtual world. Second Life was too complicated in the time (and a bit 'last year'); Habbohotel (although an old favourite) had firewall issues; previous groups disliked Entropia (even if we could get it installed in time); I've had too much WoW at home and so we went back to a very old favourite TappedIn. Many is the time that as PaulBM I've had the whole server to myself while the USA slept. It still worked very well for our guest students and I enjoyed being back in my old virtual office.

Describing what we have ended up doing

Both secondary school and community learning classes begin again today and we start our last Web2.0 activities of this funding year. The latest activities reflect the circuitous route through which our 'community of development' has evolved. It contains all the benefits of a community of practice (sharing enthusiams, sharing tacit knowledge, identifying mind-focussing deadlines, etc) but with pre-defined outcomes in terms of materials or skills/knowledge levels and (in our case) wider benefits to the learners taking part in the activities.
Our work has grown from an original Aimhigher-funded project on the contribution of libraries to enterprise skills and thus this week with a new partner school each group of Web2.0 learners will compare search engines and IM services (comparing their results with JD Power ratings) but the learners will do it as a social enterprise business plan-based project. They may also gain pre-negotiated enterprise outcome rewards (money) or competence certificates. Next week's groups will compare wiki software and assess the sustainability.
Thus typically a quadplay of:

• partners across a range of organisations working together for mutual support
• shared advocacy role to other stakeholders in partner organisations
• outcomes in terms of written material or stored knowledge/warnings
• real learning and enterprise activities beyond using or testing Web2.0

I will need to articulate this much more clearly before describing it on wider and scarier stage at the EDEN 2007 Annual Conference

Community of development

I've been doing a lot of reading on 'communities of practice' in the last couple of days aided by blogs or blog entries that are appearing on the Emerge site. I guess what we are aiming for amongst libraries and community organisations in the Tees Valley (and the North East of England also) is a 'community of development' where we share information and help our customers but also cooperate in moving forward / enhancing our knowledge and services.
My work on the paper for MLA North East on 'possibilities and risks' for libraries will be much aided by a comprehensive new conference paper from Brian Kelly (with Mike Ellis) based in the analagous museum sector. I'll try to set aside my bitterness that he's delivering it in San Francisco.
Next week I'm meeting with Oliver Davy from North Tyneside Libraries. He has done a lot of work on developing Web2.0 services.

So much information.....

Well I'm back in the office and predictably there are loads of new information on Web 2.0 etc. Hard to digest. My college partners successfully used a very useful recent article last week as preparatory reading for a staff development workshop. This was Kassandra Barnes, Raymond Marateo and S. Pixy Ferris's description in Innovate of the learning styles and preference of Net Generation learners and the implications of these attributes for educators. Innovate is very worthwhile subscribing to.
It was also good to have contact with Sarah McNicol to improve our knowledge of engagement in libraries.