Notes on the OG
After a day of tussling with the intricacies of the Opportunities Gateway, I am happy to report that it is finally beginning to take shape – a fact confirmed by a member of the Learning Directorate who was pleased with the progress. Now that we have created a solid foundation for the Gateway, we will be opening it up for discussion. Over the next few weeks we hope to get a better sense of both staff and students’ expectations. I am slightly nervous when I think this exercise may result in having to go back to the drawing board. This is because since its inception the Gateway has been a repository of various ideologies, which means it probably means different things to different people.
The focus of my work has been to see how the main underlying principals – to encourage reflection on the student experience and create a readiness for opportunity – can be achieved through the Gateway web-resource. What makes this process tricker is that it has to run in tandem with the services offered by the Learning Directorate, which in turn face the common constraints of time, manpower and resources. I find this mix of functional and ideological aspects very exciting. It has been a very interesting experience to create something tangible after the dozens of conversations that have taken place over the past few months. Just a few weeks ago I was sitting in on a steering group meeting furiously taking notes as people defined their expectations from the Gateway. The tone of the meeting was such that when I had a look at it a day later, some of my jottings took me by surprise. For instance, I have absolutely no idea what the phrase ‘ideological extrapolation’ means. I went through the list a couple of times and then let the ideas settle at the back of my head – hoping for some problem solving to take place in the subconscious.
This morning, sat in front of a blank A1 sheet of flip-chart paper, there was only a slight moment of confusion on how to proceed. After a few false starts, I tried to define the Gateway through the relationships it seeks to promote. That is between the staff, students and the wider world. Fortunately, this approach was spot-on and within a few hours I went through a number of iterations of the Gateway framework. Obviously there still are a fair few loose ends which need to be taken care of. But I think that what we have is sufficient to create the first public face – a wireframe for the Gateway. The challenge is to see if this survives the first round of feedback.
We have a student focus group scheduled in a couple of weeks which will be followed by another steering group meeting. I shall post more notes on the development of the Gateway over the coming weeks.
28
Feb 10
Different routes into enterprise in education
Routes into enterprise
This past week I attended an event organized by Nybep on the theme of enterprise in education. It was very well laid out, starting with a series of inspiring presentations followed by an intense networking session that culminated in a group discussion. Despite the range of different activities the setting was quite relaxed and I had some interesting conversations with representatives from Yorkshire Forward, Business Link, The Prince’s Trust and so on.
The most interesting aspect of the proceedings was the group discussion that took place towards the end. We had to answer a series of questions related to enterprise development. As the people round my table were from different backgrounds, we ended up sharing some unique perspectives. This 20 minute discussion showed that the triggers of enterprise can be either objective or subjective. The latter aren’t necessarily any less pragmatic, but given their intangible nature, their benefits aren’t necessarily conducive to quantitative analysis.
This discussion confirmed my belief that there are a number of different routes into enterprise. Therefore, the process of embedding enterprise into students’ psyche should follow a more holistic approach.
One of the best ways to achieve this is by encouraging collaboration and dialogue. Not only should students work within their peer group, they should also be encouraged to interact with those outside their own disciplines. Consider the case of universities – it is natural for specialist groups and hubs to develop over time. There are a number of obvious benefits associated with these specialist clusters. However, there is also tremendous value in creating dialogue between them.
Fearless Entrepreneurs
Inculcating a tansdisciplinary approach to problem solving offers a number of benefits to students. For example, the ability to contextualize different perspectives and the ability to delegate responsibilities. These basic skills create entrepreneurs (and researchers) who are able to follow an intuitive approach, which in turn, is one of the best triggers of original thinking. The end result is that you get ‘fearless’ entrepreneurs who are comfortable with the notion of sourcing talent and ideas through collaboration with like minded people.
This resonates with the point of view expressed by one of the presenters at the event – it is not always the case of what you know, but who you know. My take on the ‘who’ is a vast and diverse pool of talented individuals who can make a positive contribution towards the realization of your goals. Collaboration in this way is also an effective combatant to nepotism.
Real time collaboration
Given the technology that is available at our fingertips, it is fairly straightforward to bridge the gap between the concept of ‘fearless’ entrepreneurs, which may appear to be idealistic at first glance, and the reality of mainstream education. With the ubiquity of social networks on the World Wide Web, it is easier than ever to share ideas beyond cultural and geographical barriers. Furthermore, there is the added advantage that most students are familiar with the mechanistic operation of these networks. They can setup individual profiles and navigate them to source information. What is lacking, is the ability to engage with them in the right context.
A blog is just a blog…
The blog is a good example of how a social media platform can become a valuable tool for communication and collaboration. Many people still prefer to think that a blog is a repository of discontinuous and jumbled narratives far too tedious to engage with. However, if you examine some of the features offered by popular blogging websites, the benefits become immediately apparently. For example, most websites allow you to add information through a content management system whose appearance is very similar to a word processing software. This does away with the need to know html/css. You can also change the appearance of a blog thanks to the large number of freely available themes or skins. Some of these themes can turn your blog into a website interface – with individual ‘pages’.
By simply registering for a blog and applying a theme you have a website to which you can easily add multimedia content – text/audio/video and so on. And as a consequence of the platform you have a number of powerful tools at your disposal to contextualize (tags) and syndicate (rss feeds) the information you upload. You can now invite meaningful interaction with your target audience.
The above approach is just one example of facilitating collaboration on the World Wide Web. Provided you follow some basic norms of creating and publishing information, there are scores of other platforms which offer varying degrees of flexibility and freedom to achieve what you want to do.
Safeguards
There are a number of issues related to facilitating engagement with social media. These include, protection of intellectual property, privacy, data protection and so on. I believe schools and HEIs are in a unique position to embed best practice by providing guided, hands-on experience to students as part of the mainstream curriculum and extra curricular activities. More about this in another post.