Wilbert’s work blog

Making Personal Development Planning (PDP) an integral part of the learning and teaching process seems to be a bit of a challenge. Put bluntly, students don’t see the point unless it is assessed and counts towards the degree/diploma.

While I can’t pretend to be particularly knowledgeable in the area, I keep hearing stories of all kinds of artificial constructs that make what should be a reflective dialogue with experts more like a course. The reason is simple: institutions are geared to deliver lectures, tutorials and mark assignments and exams. Any learning process or activity that doesn’t follow that pattern fits badly.

As my colleague Oleg asked, when are students supposed to actually do PDP- in the middle of a lecture?

Thinking back of my secondary school days, I realised that that was exactly what I did, almost every day. In my school, though we didn’t call it that, PDP was the central organising principle, not the subject course or lesson.

To be sure, my school was a rather unusual place, inspired by the pedagogical ideas of the early 20th Century Dutch educator, pacifist and Quaker Kees Boeke. At the school, there were no marks, just pass or no pass, with specific comments. There were very few ’stand up and teach’ sessions either, most hours were essentially unstructured consulting sessions where pupils of all grades and ages could collaborate with each other, work on their own or interact with the teacher. Everyone was expected to work at their own pace.

Most of all, though, the curriculum for any given subject was only partially defined. Roughly a third of the work had fixed content and assessment, another third defined the topic -but not much else-, and the final third was entirely open, bounded only by the subject area. That meant that most of the learning was negotiated between the individual learner and the subject teacher.

While this may sound like some anti-authoritarian, hippy paradise, the kids were just as ruthlessly assessment driven as they are anywhere else. What made the system work was that it harnessed that drive, by organising the learning process around credits. For a majority of these credits, you had to negotiate what learning they accredited first. And that meant reflecting on what competencies you already had, and which ones you needed, personal interests, cross-overs with other subjects and more. Just jumping through the pre-set hoops wasn’t an option, you had to do PDP.

The school, alas, has long shut down. I wonder, though, whether anyone today would have the guts to forgo the safety of packaged curriculum delivery and testing in order to compel students to negotiate each credit.

Here’s an idea that’s equal parts compelling and frightening: a presence service that is integrated not with a instant message client, but with your mobile’s contact book.

A presence service is the bit of an Instant Messaging (IM) application such as MSN, AIM or Yahoo Messenger that makes it possible to see which of your buddies is online, usually with a mood message thrown in (”bored”, “working from home” etc.).

It is what makes IM so compelling, to the point that many kids think email is just for old people (ars technica). Mobiles, of course, are not so stratified by age, but a quick glance in any public place in Western Europe will demonstrate that the under 25s are particularly attached to theirs. Hence the notion that tying presence information to a mobile’s contact list could prove to be very popular indeed with that crowd.

As befits the place, a couple of Finns have had that brainwave, and are now busy implementing it in, you guessed it, Nokia phones (Jaiku). More than that, they’ve clocked that a mobile can show much more “social peripheral vision” than simple presence online: it can also show location.

Once you’ve got that, you can let your imagination run riot. No more “I’m on the train” type conversations, because your mate can simply see that before even calling you. You could see how close, physically, your mates are to you when you look for them in a busy place. You can also see where all your mates are at any given point- like, all together, but not with you. And since these are mobiles, not PCs, even not seeing someone online can become quite significant.

With most modern tech, there’s usually a period of grace before abuse starts happening and rules are required. Think email before spam, or the web before people figured out how to make money on it. With this one, even the pioneers are keenly aware of the massive potential for abuse and a possible need to put some limits on the technology.

It might still prove too compelling to stop, though.