Response to BIS New Challenges Consultation

Rethinking FE & Community Learning in the Networked Society

NEFG have argued for some time, that we need new measures for evaluating effectiveness and engagement within FE institutions. We think this can be inspired by the characteristics of a networked society as delineated by O’Reilly in What is Web 2.0? Using this as both a basis and as a prompt we developed the concept of an organisational Architecture of Participation. This helps us identify models of agile and adaptive organisation structures that we will need in the 21st Century. We also developed the notion of networked Public Value (nPV), to help redefine collaborative stakeholder processes in the networked society, and which also reflects the long and distinctive tradition of Public Service in the UK.

We have many years of experience of working within FE and community learning as lecturers, course leaders, trainers, senior managers, managers, inspectors, trustees and national advisors. Based on their particular experience of inspecting post-compulsory institutions, developing post Web 2.0 pedagogues and working with a range colleges to create a collaborative development framework that used new technologies to drive quality improvement we have three main framing principles.

Firstly we need 21st Century institutions that are learning-centric and adaptive to learner needs.
Secondly we need to develop community-responsive institutions that can meet local needs in ways that a appreciate to them and key stakeholders
Thirdly we need to enable the sector to develop and drive its own agendas, meeting national requirements for quality assurance and effectiveness, using measures that are developed and owned by the sector, but which provide sufficient open data as well as tools for analytics, so that all these processes are transparent.

What follows is our selected response to the BIS Consultation ending today. 

Practitioner Attitudes to Technology

LSIS Practitioner Survey 2011 

Title; Practitioner attitudes to technology: a new means to explore practitioner and provider e-confidence and transformation.

Background; This blog post relates to a presentation given at Greenwich University on July 6 2011 by Nigel Ecclesfield of LSIS based on a survey commissioned by LSIS in the Spring of 2011 and involving 5 FE Colleges and over 200 practitioners.

Findings; The surprising findings were that practitioners now comfortably deploy a range of technologies for learning, VLEs (especially Moodle), social media and subject-specific resources. More importantly their focus is driven by a student-centred approach to the use of technologies for learning with a clear focus on how they contribute to learning outcomes.

Greenwich University; The presentation, called E-maturity at LSIS 2011,
is for the Enhanced and Transformed; Tales for the Digital Age conference,

The Craft of Teaching 2011

A Timely Intervention by nefg

The first post on the nefg blog is to highlight our new slideshare presentation; The Craft of teaching 2011. This is designed to be a self-contained resource for you to use as you wish, capturing our ideas in a way that should allow you to use the resource, or prompt reflection on your practice when you follow the links to the great practice we have highlighted.

The presentation can be viewed on slideshare; it was the top presentation on Twitter on January 9 2011 and is currently featured on Slideshare Education.

Further thoughts on the Open Context Model of Learning and the PAH Continuum can be found on The Heutagogic Archive blog

Further thoughts on developing Participatory Organisations and a discussion of Social Capital and the purposes of Learning can be found on the Architecture of Participation blog.

Fred Garnett