Dick Sblog

I recently applied for money to fund a project addressing the issue of work related learning. Predictably,  my approach was focused on distributed working. The growth in flexible/home based and distributed working is one of the most significant changes to working practice in recent years and with the pressure on to reduce travel costs and carbon footprints, these new models of working are only going to grow in importance.

Needless to say, I wasn’t successful. (This fits with my life experience – I think the only signficant thing I’ve ever won was a china horse, when I was 6. Well, it was significant to me then. Mind you, I won £5.20p on the Eurolottery last week so things may be looking up). However, this particular failure was a real disappointment as participation in the project was fairly well sewn up and involved a group of schools, led by the Head of Bedminster Down School, The Hub, (a social enterprise providing shared facility/networking facilities) and iEARN, about which I’ve written often before.  All were enthusiastic about developing a model in which the topic for a learning circle was to be determined by a group of employers who would themselves, then providing online mentoring to the participating students. (A learning circle is an iEARN method involving teams of students from 5 schools, collaborating in a study). It seemed to us that the approach was scaleable and could be adopted anywhere in the country, working with local or distant school partners and/or employers.

The beauty of this was that the learning circle would focus on a specific, real-world problem determined by employers (in our case social entrepeneurs) rather than a curriculum example which has been covered ad infinitum by earlier cohorts of students. So the method harnessed the motivation of doing something useful as well as the novelty of using new technologies and the engagement factor of social networking.

I’ll be interested to know if any of the successful pilots address the issue of distributed working – I live in hope.

All this puts me in mind of another socially useful potential piece of collaboration. At Grid Computing Now!, the government supported Knowledge Transfer Network, we have just launched our 2008 competition. So, in the unlikely event that this blog is being read by someone with an interest in developing ways in which grid or related technologies can contribute to saving the world from the superheated mess we are dragging it into – go to our competiton page