John Cook Research Profile For D4DL SIG visit to & talks with the DCRC/REACT hub @ Pervasive Media Studio, Watershed, May 22nd 2013: http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/8427

1. John Cook
Professor in Education
Director of the Bristol Centre for Research
in Lifelong Learning and Education (BRILLE)
Research Profile
For D4DL SIG visit to & talks with the DCRC/REACT hub @ Pervasive Media Studio,
Watershed, May 22nd 2013: http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/8427

2. A cautionary tale!
Formal & informal learning
Health Warning
formal learning
did this to me


3. 7 years later & informal learning
saves me!

4. 7 years later & informal learning!
Formal learning strikes
back and did this to me
4 years ago!!

5. Reintegrated John? 2 years ago

6. Parent
Rugby union
fan
Partner/husband
Analyst/Programmer
Lecturer &
ResearcherSelf taught bass
player
PhD
students
John
Formal learning plus
learning in informal
contexts
BSc/MSc/PhD
LIFE …
Music

7. Research Highlights
 Concept of problem seeking in music (Cook, 2000), based on PhD work
 Rather than mere problem solving
 In the early creative/design process we can say that “knowledge is essentially
problematical: it is not just a question of solving a problem, it is more a question of
seeking out the nature of the problem and then devising an approach to solving it”
(Cook, 2000)
 Brought in over £5 million external R&D funding
 RAE 2008 I co-led on the submission of London Met UoA ‘Education’
 Ranked upper quintile @ joint 16th with Bath and Newcastle
 All old Universities submitted (including Oxbridge, Bristol & IoE)
 If strip out environment our papers were in top 5!
 My own publications were rated 3*/4* in a 2007 mock RAE (the external was the
former Chair of the 2000 RAE Education UoA, Prof. Sally Brown)
 I note UWE submission for 2008 UoA ‘Communication, Cultural and Media Studies’ also
ranked joint 16th with Oxford & Leeds

9. 22/05/2013

10. Socio-Cultural Ecology: The Triangle
(Pachler, Bachmair and Cook, 2010)
 Structures (digital tools and media) Giddens, 1984, structuration theory
 Structural properties are instantiated in practice (so links to cultural practices)
 Educational institutions no longer define alone what learning and knowledge are and they are certainly no longer
the only, even the main location where learning and knowledge can be accessed and takes place
 From push to pull, change of mass communication and media convergence
 Individualised mobile mass communication and social fragmentation into different milieus
 Milieus do have the function of individualised life-worlds, which are structured by the hierarchical variable of
differentials in income and formal education. This is the traditional social stratification.
 Agency (capacity to act on the world) Hall, 1997, individualised agency practices of everyday life
 Formation of identity and subjectivity
 Environment a potential resource for learning
 Different habitus of learning and media attitudes; a new habitus of learning is one of the characteristics of at risk-
learners
 By ‘habitus’ we follow Bourdieu: dispositions and action patterns based on appropriated social structures within
typical cultural practices (the original purpose of that behaviour or belief can no longer be recalled and becomes
socialized into individuals of that culture).
 Cultural practices (routines in stable situations, and beyond …)
 Institutional settings, be they school, university, the work place etc.
 Media practices in everyday life (includes informal/non-formal)

11. Augmented Contexts for Development:
qualitative analysis of process and explanatory
perspective, looking at the inner features of the
situation (Cook, 2010)
Screen shot of Carl Smith’s
wire-frame movie
reconstruction of Nine Alters
(http://cistercians.shef.ac.uk/)
Students interacting @
Cistercian Chapel in
CONTSENS

13. “The ability to be in a particular position but get a
variety of views/different visual perspective was a very
useful opportunity. The whole thing also got everyone
talking in a way I hadn't experienced on field trips to
Fountains before.”

14. “The information given was underlined by the
'experience' of the area and therefore given context in
both past and present.”

15. Three Current Research Foci
Research Focus 1: Reshaping workplace design to
facilitate better learning
(Cook & Pachler, 2010; Cook, 2013)
1http://mashable.com/2011/08/08/mobile-workers-infographic/

16. BOYD: Bring Your Own Device
 Smartphones, tablets, laptops ... Wearables …
 6.8 billion phone subscriptions & 2.7 billion people are online (UN’s
International Telecommunication Union, 2013)
 With our increasingly mobile workforce, consumerisation in IT has led
to staff demanding to use their own devices for work - or for distractions
during work breaks!
 Citrix cites savings of up to 20% (FT Jan 4, 2012)
 IBM claims 80,000 staff are now accessing its corporate network
using self-owned devices (Computerworld, March 2012)

17. 1
Layers Project: Consortium
Project Coordination
Technology Research
Regional Application Clusters
Scaling Partners
Technology Partners
Health Care – Leeds
Construction &
Building – Bremen
http://learning-layers.eu/

18. 1
Clusters
the Layers scaling strategy
 Research and develop solutions by working
with Excellence clusters and cluster policy
makers
 Piloting in Healthcare and construction.
 Involve new clusters in new countries
 Build sustainability beyond project horizon
by promoting a network of Education
Innovation Clusters to serve other clusters
with services and technologies to speed
uptake of new learning methods and
technologies

19. 1
Timeline for our work

20. Semantic Searching
of textual-audio-visual archives
 Semantic Tagging: add structure/meaning to tags by connecting
keyword tags to relational structures
 Folksonomies: collaborative tagging, social classification, social
indexing, and social tagging
 Taxonomies and/or ontologies: relational structures
 People Tagging e.g. Collabio, a tagging game developed by Microsoft
 Semantic annotation: or tagging, is about attaching names, attributes,
comments, descriptions, etc. to a document or to a selected part in a
text
 Natural language processing
 Social Semantic Networks: result of the application of Semantic Web
technologies to social networks and online social media

21. 2

22. Research Focus 2: Rethinking Design Research

23. Towards a Design Research Framework for Scaling the use of TEL to
Support Informal Work-Based Learning
(Cook, Bauters, et al., submitted)
2
Cook, J., Bauters, M., Colley, J., Bannan, B., Schmidt, A. and Leinonen, T. (submitted). Towards a Design Research Framework for Scaling the use of
TEL to Support Informal Work-Based Learning, EC-TEL (European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning), Cyprus, September 2013.

24. Design Seeking and Scaling (Cook and Bannan, in preparation)

25. Research Focus 3: Using Social Network Sites and
Mobile Technology for Bridging Social Capital
(Cook, Pachler and Bachmair, 2012)
 It is a democratic right for citizens to have ‘equity of access’ to cultural
resources (widely defined).
 Some research suggests that in HE Facebook, for example, provides
affordances that can help reduce barriers that students with lower self-
esteem might experience in forming the kinds of large, heterogeneous
networks that are sources of social capital.
 ‘Trust’ is a key issue in this respect.
 Thus, there appears to be considerable potential for network and
mobile technology in terms of sustainability in the integration of informal
and formal institutional dimensions of learning.
 However, although a new educational paradigm is emerging, there
exists a need for more debate and further research.

26. As it stands, there still appears to exist a small conceptual
gap around cultural resources.
Society and cultural forces help shape technology, and in
this sense it has been said that ‘we cannot jump over our
shadows’ (Kress, 2007).
Do such forces also set the limits of appropriation and
transformation of technology and indeed define the level of
access to cultural resources?
We cannot jump over our shadows (and hence
‘appropriate’ the shadow, i.e. make use of shadows in a
culturally novel way to meet a new purpose) – or can we?

27. Extending the shadow metaphor, the principles of sundials
can be understood better from the perspective of the sun’s
apparent motion across the sky.
In fact, a sundial is a latitude-specific technology to indicate
the time; it uses (or appropriates) the shadow created by
the sun’s light as the Earth spins on its axis around the sun.
The shadow-casting object is the sundial’s gnomon, which
is the triangular object (above right).
Maybe there are occasions when we can jump over our
shadows by appropriation, or when we need help to see
beyond?

28. In this sense, innovative and creative thinkers and groups
have always been able to jump over the shadow created by
society and culture. Is that not a paradigm shift?
Or is it a creative act a reaction propelling a concept
over the historical shadow of society?
On a more personal level, what if we want to provide equity
of access to cultural resources for individuals and groups?
What do we mean by this and how could we achieve it?

29. References
 Cook, J. (2000). Cooperative Problem-Seeking Dialogues in Learning. In Gauthier, G., Frasson, C. and VanLehn, K.
(Eds.) Intelligent Tutoring Systems: 5th International Conference, ITS 2000 Montréal, Canada, June 2000 Proceedings,
p. 615–624. Berlin Heidelberg New York: Springer-Verlag. Available:
http://www.academia.edu/3002001/Cooperative_Problem-Seeking_Dialogues_in_Learning_615624
 Cook, J. (2010). Mobile Phones as Mediating Tools Within Augmented Contexts for Development. International Journal
of Mobile and Blended Learning, 2(3), 1-12, July-September. Preprint:
http://www.academia.edu/357712/Mobile_Phones_as_Mediating_Tools_Within_Augmented_Contexts_for_Developmen
t
 Cook, J. (2013). Reshaping Workplace Design to Facilitate Better Learning. Invited talk 24th April, Division of Learning
Technologies, George Mason University, USA. Slides: http://t.co/K1DkaEE2s1
 Cook, J. and Bannan, B. (in preparation). Reconceptualising Design Research for Design Seeking and Scaling.
Workshop on Collaborative Technologies for Working and Learning (ECSCW meets EC-TEL), 21 September, Cyprus.
 Cook, J., Bauters, M., Colley, J., Bannan, B., Schmidt, A. and Leinonen, T. (submitted). Towards a Design Research
Framework for Scaling the use of TEL to Support Informal Work-Based Learning, EC-TEL (European Conference on
Technology Enhanced Learning), 18-20 September, Cyprus.
 Cook, J. and Pachler, N. (2012). Online People Tagging: Social (Mobile) Network(ing) Services and Work-based
Learning. British Journal of Education Technology, 43(5), 711–725.
http://www.academia.edu/1501290/Online_People_Tagging_Social_Mobile_Network_ing_Services_and_Work-
based_Learning
 Cook, J., Pachler, N. and Bachmair, B. (2012). Using Social Networked Sites and Mobile Technology for Bridging
Social Capital. In Guglielmo Trentin and Manuela Repetto (Eds.), Using Network and Mobile Technology to Bridge
Formal and Informal Learning, pp. 31-56. Chandos.
http://www.academia.edu/2365830/Using_social_network_sites_and_mobile_technology_to_scaffold_equity_of_access
_to_cultural_resources
 Pachler, N., Bachmair, B. and Cook, J. (2010). Mobile Learning: Structures, Agency, Practices. New York: Springer.

30. 3
More info
 http://learning-layers.eu/
 http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=1176688&trk=tab_pro
 http://westengland.academia.edu/JohnCook/About
 http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/john-cook6/
 http://twitter.com/johnnigelcook @johnnigelcook
 http://www.slideshare.net/johnnigelcook
 http://www.facebook.com/people/John-Cook/739730049