Learning and Diversity in the Cities of the Future

Learning and Diversity in the Cities of the Future was the focus of the 4th PLE Conference, which I was happy to host at Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. Now we the paper copy of the proceedings published by Logos Verlag Berlin can be ordered online.

The conference addresses the issue of smart cities, one of the key research priorities worldwide. The relatively new concept of “smart cities” has triggered a number of research and development programs, including the Horizon 2020 strategy of the European Commission, which has emphasised inclusive and sustainable growth as well as security and citizenship in the cities of the future. Discussions around smart cities have so far revolved around smart urban technologies and infrastructures targeting energy efficiency (e.g. alternative energy sources), smart transport (e.g. new mobility concepts), enabling technologies (e.g. nano-science, bio-science), but also understanding social, economic and cultural issues that are involved in the transformation of urban spaces into smart cities.

Since smart cities can be viewed as smart learning environments supporting people in their daily lives in a proactive yet unobtrusive way, learning and diversity of the citizens in the cities of the future becomes one of the key issues in relation to citizens operating in and shaping these smart technology-enhanced environments.

The papers included in the proceedings provide rich and valuable theoretical and empirical insights into learning and diversity in the cities of the future from the perspective of ever evolving Personal Learning Environments which may be conceptualised as smart urban learning environments.

The electronic version of the proceedings is available as PDF under CC BY-NC-SA here:

v5.0_PLE_Conference2013_ResearchReport_BeuthUniversity_MonashUniversity

 

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Serendipity, diversity and creativity in learning

Last week I gave a keynote presentation on serendipity and diversity in learning at FH Dortmund (Germany) as part of the KomDiM project related to Competency Development in Diversity Management in Higher Education. I enjoyed dwelling on serendipity and serendipitous learning a lot. Since my first article on serendipitous learning, followed by the book chapter in 2012, there have been a number of publications related to serendipity citing my work (e.g.  Saadatmand & Kumpulainen; Timo van Treeck & Martin Ebner; Aladjem & Nachmias). This years’ presentation explored the links between serendipity, diversity and creativity in relation to education and learning. You will find the slides in SlideShare (in German).

It could be the right time to work on a serendipity follow-up article in 2015 🙂

Serendipity & Diversity from Ilona Buchem

PLE and Smart Cities

As the guest editor of the first Special Issue of eLearning Papers on Personal Learning Environments with best papers from the PLE Conference 2013: Learning and Diversity in the Cities of the Future / 10-12 July 2013 Berlin & Melbourne, I am glad to announce that the whole Special Issue and the single articles are available online and can be downloaded as open access under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeWorks 3.0 Unported License here:

http://openeducationeuropa.eu/en/paper/personal-learning-environments

Here is the list of articles:

• Personal Learning Environments in Smart Cities: Current Approaches and Future Scenarios; Author(s):Ilona Buchem, Mar Pérez-Sanagustín
• A gamification framework to improve participation in social learning environments; Author(s):Jorge Simões, Rebeca Díaz Redondo,Ademar Aguiar, Ana Fernández Vilas
• Developing a framework for research on Personal Learning Environments; Author(s):Rita Kop, Hélène Fournier
• Developing PLEs to support work practice based learning; Author(s):Graham Attwell, Lars Heinemann, Pekka Kamarainen, Ludger Deitmer
• Using PLEs in professional learning scenarios – The Festo case for ROLE; Author(s):Maren Scheffel, Michael Werkle, Martin Wolpers
• Investigating teachers’ perception about the educational benefits of Web2.0 personal learning environments; Author(s):Ebrahim Rahimi, Jan van den Berg, Wim Veen
• Decentralized badges in educational contexts: the integration of Open Badges in SAPO Campus; Author(s):Carlos Santos, Luis Pedro, Sara Almeida,Mónica Aresta
• Personal Learning Environments: A conceptual landscape revisited; Author(s):Sebastian H.D. Fiedler, Terje Väljataga

Thank you to all authors and to the editorial team of eLearning Papers for swift collaboration on this Special Issue!

THE PLE CONFERENCE 2013

This year I was honoured to act as the General Chair of the 4th international PLE Conference, which took place 10-12 July 2013 in Berlin at Beuth University of Applied Sciences with a parallel event in Melbourne at Monash University.

The PLE Conference is dedicated to Personal Learning Environment and is an international scientific conference taking place annually, each time in a different city. Following the successful events in Barcelona in Spain 2010, in Southampton, UK in 2011, Aveiro, Portugal and Melbourne, Australia in 2012, the 4th International PLE Conference 2013 was held in Berlin, Germany and in Melbourne, Australia. The aim of the PLE Conference 2013 is to create a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experiences and research around the development and implementation of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) – including the design of environments and the sociological and educational issues that they raise.

This year, the special theme for the conference was learning and diversity in cities of the future. The focus was on how to design Personal Learning Environments in order to support diversity, cross-boundary learning and interdisciplinary transformation of urban spaces as part of highly interconnected social and technological infrastructures of smart cities.  As in smart urban spaces, people, organisations and objects become interconnected by means of new technologies and media, innovative, sustainable and inclusive solutions for connected learning become crucial not only in terms of emerging technologies but first and foremost in terms of (i) human knowledge and skills, (ii) diverse and inclusive communities, as well as (iii) learning and knowledge networks.

In search for an intelligent exploitation of networked urban infrastructures for learning and the extension of the current understanding of Personal Learning Environments, the PLE’13 Call for Papers looked for concepts, scenarios, technologies, frameworks as well as educational approaches for constructing PLEs to support learning in smart urban spaces. We are currently working on the Conference Proceedings and the Special Issues – the Special Issue of eLearning Papers (Issue 34) and in the Special Issue of the Journal of Literacy and Technology (JLT) – which will include best papers from the PLE Conference 2013. The publications are scheduled mid September.

I would like to take this opportunity and thank all of you who supported this year’s conference as a member of the Organising Committee and/or as a member of the Scientific Committee!  It has been a great experience and the success of this year’s conference would not be possible without you!!!

We will soon have the recordings of the sessions featured at  BeuthBox campus TV.  For the time being have a look at the pictures from the conference on Flickr, e.g. here + here + here + here + here + here + here +  here + here + here – and have a look at the latest updates including links to slides on SlideShare in our PLE2013 Facebook group.

Personal Learning Environments and Psychological Ownership

When does a learning environment become a Personal Learning Environment? I think it has much to do with our perception of the learning environment and a something that is ours, an environment that belongs to us, a learing environment that we own and feel responsible for, something we can identify with. This is where I think the theory of psychological ownership can help us to understand what it means to feel an owner of a learning environment. Let me just briefly introduce the idea and the study that I presented last week at the PLE Conference in Aveiro on 12.07.12

Personal Learning Environments and Psychological Ownership

View more presentations from Ilona Buchem

Last year we wrote the paper titled “Understanding Personal Learning Environments: Literature review and synthesis through the Activity Theory lens” (Buchem, Attwell & Torres, 2011). In this study based on the grounded theory analysis of over 100 publications on Personal Learning Environments it were the concepts of ownership and control that emerged as core concepts that authors related to when writing about Personal Learning Environments. It intrigued me that we know so little about what it actually means to feel an owner or be in control of a learning environment. As I searched for helpful approaches I came across a vast body of research on psychological ownership. This research, inspired by the theory of psychological ownership by Pierce et al. (2001, 2003, 2004), has been to a large extend applied to the exploration of the role of psychological ownership in organisations.  A number of studies has looked into how the feeling of being an “owner” of an organisation one worked in affected work attitudes, job performance and organisational citizenship. A number of studies showed that employees who feel owners of the organisation tend to be more satisfied with their jobs, feel responsible for what is happening in the organisation and in consequence care for the organisation as it becomes part of their self-identity.

It struck my mind that we can apply the theory of psychological ownership as framework to explore the role of ownership in context of Personal Learning Environments. This is why this year we conducted the first study, which applies the theory of psychological ownership to technology-enhanced learning environments, based on the example of ePortfolios in higher education. I presented this study at the PLE Conference 2012 in Aveiro and found out that there is a lot of interest in this approach.

The study results show that the measure of psychological ownership can be applied in to research on learning environments. The measure of psychological ownership I am proposing in the paper showed to have a very good internal consistency and I am looking forward to conducting further studies to see if the results can be replicated. One of most interesting outcomes of the study was the relation between control and ownership. The results show that while perceived control of intangible aspects of a learning environment (such as being able to determine the subject matter or access rights) has a much larger impact on the feeling of ownership of a learning environment than perceived control of tangible aspects (such as being able to choose the technology). Another interesting result was to see that psychological ownership is a very good predictor of the quality of learning in terms of engagement, invested time, creativity, interest orientation and self-direction.

This very first study seems to confirm my hypothesis that the feeling of ownership of a learning environment is significant for learning and one of the key aspects of Personal Learning Environments. What I am interested in is to find out ways to promote the sense of  ownership of learning environments in education.

References

• Buchem, Ilona, Attwell, Graham & Torres, Ricardo (2011). Understanding Personal Learning Environments:Literature review and synthesis through the Activity Theory lens. Proceedings of the The PLE Conference 2011, 10th – 12th July 2011, Southampton, UK.Sunday, July 15, 2012
• Pierce, J. L., Kostova, T., Dirks, K. (2001). Toward a theory of psychological ownership in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 26, p. 298–310. 2.
• Pierce, J. L., Kostova, T., Dirks, K. T. (2003). The state of psychological ownership: integrating and extending a century of research. Review of General Psychology, 7, p. 84– 107. 3.
• Van Dyne, L., Pierce, J.L. (2004). Psychological ownership and feelings of possession: three field studies predicting employee attitudes and organizational citizenship behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 25(4), p. 439-459.