Towards an Adult Learning Architecture of Participation

Towards an Adult Learning Architecture of Participation 1
Towards an Adult Learning Architecture of Participation
Fred Garnett,
London Knowledge Lab
Nigel Ecclesfield,
JISC

Abstract
This chapter discusses the question of what needs to be addressed in “the major
infrastructural, cultural and organisational issues if integrated formal and informal
eLearning environments are going to affect any change in the institutional regime”. It
argues that two conceptual models can help address these issues. Firstly a social
media participation model, Aggregate then Curate, that was developed on a JISC-
funded project, MOSI-ALONG, which itself was designed using an integrated model
of formal and informal learning called the Emergent Learning Model. Secondly a
“development framework” for institutional flexibility called an 'organisational
Architecture of Participation', which was co-created with 15 UK Further Education
colleges to better enable e-learning within educational institutions. Recommendations
are made concerning how to address the various infrastructural, cultural and
organisational issues that emerged during MOSI-ALONG, as we worked with local
partners to better enable adult eLearning. These also include broader proposals
concerning the need for individual adult learning institutions to have ongoing support
from collaborative hubs if they are to evolve a community-responsive institutional
life-cycle appropriate for adult learning.
Keywords; informal learning, architecture of participation, Aggregate then
Curate, social media, participation, institution life-cycles, JISC,

Background;
The authors, along with other colleagues, starting working on modelling informal
eLearning over ten years ago as part of the Metadata for Community Content research
project at Becta (Hase 2013). From that work a model of informal eLearning was
developed and presented at an invited workshop organised by ALT & Becta in 2003.
The core of that model was that effective informal eLearning allowed socially
excluded, adult, learners to identify and engage in what interested them, rather than
working through a prescribed curriculum. This was both based on research into the
practice of “informal Community eLearning” in UK online centres (Cook & Smith
2004), and the learning practice therein, identified by an advisory group of
community learning practitioners. As a consequence the role of learning support,
undertaken by what was identified in the research as “trusted intermediaries”, that is
sympathetic, trusted people from the local community, rather than professional
teachers, should be to follow and discuss the learners interests during the learning
process, which is a very ‘andragogic’ model of learning (Knowles 1970) and one that
is appropriate to adult learning. In this model of it was found that any digital learning
resources that supported such interest-driven learning could be built subsequently by
“infomediaries”, or learning technologists, as part of a process of supported informal
eLearning, by mapping to the sequences of learning as identified by learners in adult
learning contexts.
This content-creation process for informal eLearning was seen to be a dynamic
process that should reflect the learning behaviours of individuals. The UK
government community learning resources website aclearn.net (adult community
learning network), built as part of the UK National Learning Network initiative
(2000-2005) was based, in part, on that model and created digital tools like

WebQuests, based on the principle that “structured surfing is learning” (Dodge,
1997). These tools were designed to allow for trusted intermediaries to adapt and
modify them for their own learning contexts (both for individuals and for centres).
This developmental model of informal eLearning came to be called the Community
Development Model of Learning as it was driven by both centre and learner
behaviours (Garnett 2005).
Open Context Model of Learning
However this model of informal eLearning, despite allowing context-responsive
learning resources to be created, was, to some extent, context specific; learners were
users in UK online centres who accessed and used a particular range of learning
resources. Whilst this approach was about allowing learners to use the affordances of
web-based resources as they so wished, the subsequent emergence of open learning,
which we align to the launch of the Open University Open Learn programme in 2007,
provided us with a real possibility to evolve, and perhaps generalise, this model. At
that time the authors were involved with a group of researchers and practitioners
called the learner-generated contexts research group, who had experience from across
all educational sectors, as well as adult and community education, and together we
developed a more general and open pedagogic model that could be adapted to context,
purpose and learners. We felt that for learning to be open it would also need a open
pedagogy which would allow the use of any web-based or open learning resource and
that could help guide the design of learning programmes in any context, sector or
institution. As a consequence the Open Context Model of Learning was designed to
integrate features of school-based learning (subject pedagogy, which could provide a
focus), of adult learning (negotiation and learning-management, which could provide

a process) and of research (heutagogy, which could provide a stimulus for creativity).
We called this integrated process the PAH Continuum (table 1) arguing that teachers
should always be showing learners how to learn and, more importantly, how to
develop and manage the learning that they themselves had determined was important.
In a way we were extending Knowles model of adult learning to further empower the
self-management of learners, supported by trusted intermediaries, in the emerging,
open contexts of Web 2.0 and the developing availability of free, open education
resources (OERs).
Table 1. A Schematic of the PAH Continuum (Luckin et al 2010)
Pedagogy Andragogy Heutagogy
Locus of Control Teacher teacher/learner Learner
Education Sector Schools Adult education Research
Cognition Level Cognitive Meta-cognitive Epistemic cognition
Knowledge Production
Context
Subject understanding Process negotiation Knowledge creation
Emergent Learning Model
Whilst the open context model of learning came out of many projects and earlier
theories (Luckin et al, 2010) we didn’t build any specific projects based on it; it was
designed to be a guide to future thinking about learning. Thomas Cochrane in New
Zealand, however, did use it in the course design of the BA in Product Design at
Unitec, where it helped them decide on the use of mobile technologies for learning
across the 4 years that the degree lasted (Cochrane, 2009). To us this suggested that
the PAH Continuum could be taken as a heuristic and used in the design of learning

because the course team at Unitec had carried out this work independently, and to
great effect.
However the European Union (EU), following the completion of the Bologna process,
which integrated the course offerings of all universities across Europe, turned to the
problem of integrating what it called informal, non-formal and formal learning as part
of their Information Society plans, originally for i2015, but now for i2020. For the EU
formal learning is defined as HE, or university-based education, and non-formal as
vocational college-based learning. Informal learning was less clearly defined,
including a range of learning based on individual interests, such as reading, or social
activities such as hobbies, along with more structured adult education as well as the
use of libraries.
Nonetheless this proposal , whilst about integrating learning, as opposed to education,
was still defined by a proposal to integrate across existing educational sectors. This
completely missed what we, and others (Haythornthwaite 2010), had been
discovering about the learning process in post-web 2.0 contexts, which we had
reflected in the PAH Continuum element of the open context model of learning,
namely that we can now digitally combine elements of different modes of learning,
without being physically constrained by the educational sectors within which they
originate (table 1) so we can now create what we call “learner-centric” learning. We
felt that, for the purposes of integrating learning we could better model the flow of
learning as a sequence by starting with social organisation, before accessing resources
and, finally, achieving accreditation. We believed that learning starts with the
informality of social interactions but that, whilst we are accredited by formal
educational institutions for them to provide evidence that we have learnt,

metacognitive learning processes are best supported by social interactions between
learners, and this is particularly true, of course, in adult education.
In line with this thinking, derived from both our practice and out research, we created
the Emergent Learning Model (Garnett et al, 2009) to model how self-organised
learning processes could be laid across the existing institutions and patterns of
education (table 2). We also believed that in a web 2.0-world learning can be as much
about new content creation as it is the consumption of existing educational content.
The increasing availability of OERs also offers the possibility of learners selecting
between existing content from different sources (Kamenetz, 2009) as learners need no
longer to be contained within a classroom using a single textbook. More so than the
Open Context Model of Learning, which was perhaps more of a heuristic, the
Emergent Learning Model made it possible to design new learning experiences. We
did this by developing the Ambient Learning Environment model to test this model in
a range of contexts, initially but inconclusively with Kew Gardens, and then, quite
effectively in Manchester as an Ambient Learning City.
Table 2. A Schematic of the Emergent Learning Model (Garnett et al 2009)
INFORMAL INFORMAL NON-
FORMAL
NON-
FORMAL
FORMAL FORMAL
People People Resources Resources Institutions Institutions
Individual Social Created Provided Adaptive Accredited
Groups Audiences Learning
Sequences
Learning
Resources
Home Classes
Aggregations Groups Web 2.0 Tools Set texts Library Units

Individuals Channels Media
Templates
TV
Programmes
Community Qualifications
«ADMIN ACCESS
»»
SCAFFOLDING
««
ADMIN»
LEARNING >> << EDUCATION
Learners
Learning skills should
be; a) organising people
b) Accessing resources
Teachers
Teachers skills should be;
a. Structuring resources
b. Brokering accreditation
Supported by;
Trusted Intermediaries
Supported by;
Tools & Skills
People are how we scaffold
organization
Resources are how we scaffold
learners
Institutions are how we scaffold
accreditation
Testing Emergence
The MOSI-ALONG project, originally part of the Ambient Learning Manchester
project, was designed as a JISC Community Content project. However we were
interested in content creation as learning and wanted to work with the Museum of
Science and Industry to develop participatory curatorial strategies concerning the
historical objects both on display and in their archived collections. Hence the project
name MOSI-ALONG, which both stood for Museum of Science and Industry
Ambient Learning Open Network Group, and also indicated that we wanted it to be a
project that was treated informally. We took our key guidance from Nina Simon in
The Participatory Museum, which documents a whole range of museum initiatives to
encourage participatory activities by visitors. We also had a number of informal
discussions with the cultural broker Trevor Horsewood on how to develop
participatory curatorial strategies with museums, as he had prior experience of this
both physically and digitally.

It quickly became apparent that the museum took a very traditional view of the role of
curators in a process of community content creation. For them any community group,
or individual, could bring objects into the museum for curators to view, but only
professional curators would be allowed to determine their provenance and value. This
is how the excellent RunCoCo project, and toolkit, works, and works well, but from
our perspective this felt perhaps more like an “Antiques Roadshow” model of
learning, full of supplication to the decisions of experts, which is appropriate to the
curatorial tradition with which they were working, and the museums they worked
with, such as the Imperial War Museum. However our work was based on following
the interest-driven model of learning which we had been developing, as discussed
above, which required designing different relationships between our users, the
cultural content to be chosen, which would reflect learners interests, and the expert
curators consulted, as we were interested in developing fresh learning outcomes in
cultural contexts.
On being told by the museum that the relationship with various socially-excluded
communities in the Greater Manchester area was that they were all free to visit the
museum, whereas we wanted museum activity to be based in the community and to
involve capturing peoples own stories, we sat down and redesigned the project by
trying to integrate a participatory approach to object curation with an open model of
learning. This gave us two key tools to work with; digital ‘cabinets of curiosities’ and
a social media participation model called ‘Aggregate then Curate’
New Learning, New Metaphors
In the Participatory Museum Nina Simon highlights the importance of “object centred
sociality” and she quotes a 2002 report from the Glasgow Open Museum which

determined that “physical objects played a unique role in validating diverse cultural
experiences, acting as catalysts for self-expression, and enhancing learning” (authors
emphasis). With this in mind we went back to the first principles of community
engagement and created the idea, or rather the new metaphor, of Digital Cabinets of
Curiosities. Instead of Mancunians visiting the Museum of Science & Industry to tell
their stories about the objects that the museum owned, as we had originally
envisioned, we would help people create their own cabinets of curiosities full of
objects that they owned and we would support their self-expression, learning (and the
learning of others), by encouraging them to tell their own stories about their own
objects.
One of the things we have found in developing new learning projects with social
media and new technology, in the post web 2.0 world, is that that we often need new
metaphors. Whilst we have made a general case that learning can take place in ‘open
contexts’ if we wish for that open learning to be appropriate for a specific ‘new’
context then we have found that a fresh metaphor is really helpful, indeed necessary,
as it reframes thinking about activities and, to some extent, frees people from earlier
pre-conceptions. In Manchester we used, very successfully, this idea of curating
Cabinets of Curiosities, which themselves have a long history associated with the
foundation of collections, and of museums themselves (Mauries, 2011). The
Wellcome Collection in London is perhaps the best example of a cabinet of
curiosities; it is simply a collection of whatever objects Henry Wellcome brought
back from his travels in the 19th
century. Cabinets of objects are simple to assemble
because they are just a place of storage for collections of things people choose to
collect. Describing such objects is easy as well, they are simply the stories that

collectors tell about the objects that the cabinet contains, and these stories can be
about the collector’s personal life, working life, their interest in the objects, their
reasons for collecting them, the objects history or perceived aesthetic value. The
narrative that is created by the stories that you tell about your cabinet of curiosities is
your narrative and so you, and only you, are the ultimate expert on that collection,
rather than a museum curator. This completely personal narrative about a cabinet of
curiosities immediately makes this metaphor, this activity, very socially inclusive,
whilst also opening up the possibilities for discourse and understanding the objects
from other perspectives than just your own. Digital cabinets of curiosities, as we
developed as a part of our social media project MOSI-ALONG, are simply digital
representations of your collected objects, and can be made in a number of ways, as
can be seen on the website of Peoples Voice Media, who were the social media
partners for the project.
We worked with many groups across Manchester, holding workshops in community
centres, like Arc Space, in local libraries as well as in the Manchester Mad Lab.
Interestingly for a socially inclusive project working across Greater Manchester the
project was adopted most enthusiastically by the Salford History group, who were
mostly Old Age Pensioners. They were very excited by this model and made several
films about their own personal collections of objects from their working lives in
Salford and Manchester, one of which won the social media competition the project
had organised in partnership with Cornerhouse. Other interesting digital cabinets of
curiosities, as interpreted by participants, were a Facebook photo collection of objects
collected for a book about the Manchester Ship Canal, a film about Manchester by a
newcomer, and a local reggae history. Most significantly, perhaps, during the riots in
Manchester someone who had heard of the project created a Google doc called ‘A

History of Manchester in 100 objects’ asking people who were proud of Manchester
to contribute an object virtually that represented Manchester to them and to comment
why; over 130 people responded creating a positive feeling about the city during a
bad time in its recent history (see MOSI-ALONG blog). David Roberts, who had set
up the resource, said that ‘the intention was to help produce a sense of community
amongst those taking part at a confusing time’ (Whitworth et al, 2012), and simply
selecting an object and telling a personal story about this achieved that intention.
Creating a sense of community in economic hard times had been one of the aims of
the project. Walter Benjamin has explored this sense of connecting individual
narratives to their context and history in his essay on Nicolai Leskov “The
Storyteller” (Benjamin 1973).
Digital Learning Champions & Social Media Surgeries
It was clear that this process of physical aggregation and storytelling, followed by
digital curation, which created various digital artifacts, worked because we had
various support workers involved. We had the support of local Digital Learning
Champions in Libraries and community centres who were regularly providing training
and guidance for learners. We provided some training for them, such as social media
surgeries organised by our technical partner MIMAS, and documented their activities,
along with project management support, also from MIMAS, as well as an almost
unique social media partner, Peoples Voice Media who have embraced the notion of
citizen journalism and train ‘community reporters’, some of whom worked on the
projects.
However the critical element in making the project work was the social media
participation model we developed called ‘Aggregate then Curate’ following a project

workshop and discussions with another partner, Stevie Flower of Manchester’s
MadLab, who also ran workshops to support the project. Aggregate then Curate was
designed to allow for interested-driven activities to be at the core of participants
curating cultural content. It is a 7-step model which also structures the engagement of
'trusted intermediaries', in order to assure some quality in project activities. In terms
of the MOSI-ALONG project this structuring had 3 related qualities, i) curating
artifacts ii) using social media for digital storytelling iii) recognising learning.
Whitworth (2012) also argues that the Aggregate then Curate also addresses criticisms
from Keen that Web 2.0 enables what he calls the ‘cult of the amateur’. We would
argue that we have developed a co-creation process that can scaffold engagement into
a range of quality activities (table 3) and has some rigour. For a fuller discussion on
the details of the Aggregate then Curate process see Whitworth (2012)
This rigour can be seen in three types of social media training we offered over the
course of the project to both adult learners and digital earning champions;
a) Typical ‘social media surgeries, for beginners or novices, introducing basic social
media, particularly Twitter for communication, Facebook for group organisation,
blogs for recording, as well as whatever social media that emerged during the
workshops (organised by project partner MIMAS)
b) Using the Aggregate then Curate model to scaffold more sophisticated social media
use for curatorial purposes (table 3).
c) Peoples Voice Media provided community reporters to help participants make
digital video films of their cabinets.

What we found from the project partners and the participants who made their own
cabinets was that the metaphor of cabinets of curiosities was very engaging, and
helped participants engage in the project without thinking of it as learning; they were
gaining social media to skills to help tell their stories and develop their own
narratives. We had found this aspect of engaging in learning informally to be a
critical part of the MCC research. Perhaps more importantly for us was that the
Aggregate then Curate model gave us a non-institutional, but structured, way of
modelling learning in our chosen cultural context. This also allowed us to support the
activities of interested participants and to structure the training of the support workers
(Whitworth et al 2012).
Table 3. An outline of the Aggregate then Curate Sequence (Whitworth et al 2012)
Stage Involved parties
1 Identification Participant
2 Initial aggregation Participant, community learning champion
3 Digital creation Participant, Digital Learning Champion
4 Digital aggregation Participant, Digital Learning Champion
5 Sequencing and curation Participant, Digital Learning Champion
6 Social media aggregation Social media partner, Digital Learning Champion
7 Accreditation Many possible organisations

Towards an architecture of participation for Adult Learning.
The Metadata for Community Content project research had earlier discovered and
identified a model of behaviours that the researchers (Cook & Smith 2004) labelled a
‘Life Cycle model’. In this model the effective adult community learning centre
evolves as it responds to the twin drivers of individual user needs and the broader
social needs of the community in which they are located. However this research was
carried out in the early days of UK online centres, in 2002, and whilst it identified a
three part Life Cycle which was “a cycle that relates to users, workers and the centre
itself” the subsequent research, and our own work, thereafter focused on the “literacy
lifecycle’; developing a pedagogy for producing learning content with the aim of
addressing the digital divide (Garnett 2005). It did not further address any issues
relating to the centre, or institutional Life Cycle, nor did any subsequent UK online
centre programme work or funding, and this useful insight was left hanging. A key
development in UK online centres was the Peoples Network, which were UK online
centres in Libraries. Although UK online centres continue to this day, their library
presence became the main legacy of the programme.
The evaluation survey and review carried out in 2003 by Wyatt et all (2003) produced
a report that measured the effectiveness of UK online centres but this was measured
solely in line with the policy targets set by the government, institutional behaviours
were not evaluated. Similarly NIACE subsequently developed ‘e-guides’ training
which, to some extent, was to codify the work of ‘trusted intermediaries’ as a set of
skills, but the development and evolution of the centres themselves were left to the
vagaries of local heroics and the usual pressures of funding guided by the interests
and targets provided by policy or funders.

However, in a separate research programme, the E-Maturity Framework for Further
Education (EMFFE), the authors did work on a model of institutional responsiveness
in terms of e-maturity (MIT, 1994), but with a focus on FE colleges. After one years
work with 15 colleges and a number of partners and advisors we produced a model of
institutional responsiveness that would both enable web 2.0 learning, and also to
respond to it; what we called an organisational architecture of participation (AoP). We
defined an AoP as ‘agile institutions working across collaborative networks’
(Ecclesfield & Garnett 2008). We can now see that this has similarities to the
elements of an institutional life-cycle as outlined in the MCC research. We now
believe that we can extend the AoP model to better describe the evolving
characteristics of adult learning institutions, through the inclusion of elements from
both the ‘Life Cycle' findings and the Aggregate then Curate social media
participation model.
What is an organisational Architecture of Participation?
A) Background;
We have been concerned to further develop our notion of an “organisational
architecture of participation” (Garnett and Ecclesfield, 2008) since we started our
blog with this title (Garnett and Ecclesfield, 2009). We see this ‘architecture’, as does
O’Reilly in What is Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005) in the sense of its use as an organising
principle, or platform, incorporating community, dialogic and engagement spaces that
may or may not be physical or virtual, but are definitely inclusive and open to use by
a range of publics, defined in the widest sense. Our conception further incorporates

the ideas drawn from the work of Haythornthwaite (2010), who is particularly
concerned with networked learning, and who sees learning as occurring;
• Learning spaces, both physical and virtual
• Relations connecting people
• Learning as an outcome of relations
• Learning in production as well as consumption (as noted in Luckin et al
(2010), the Russian word “obuchenie” captures this sense well)
To this we would add that, in any of these contexts, engagement is a critical feature
and that this engagement needs to be supported by ‘architectures’ that promote,
support and sustain participation. Alexander’s conception of pattern languages,
particularly as developed recently by Schuler and his collaborators in recent years
(see Schuler 2009) describes how the conscious use and structuring of language can
be helpful in framing collaborative contexts for learning and addressing political and
life issues. We have been exploring how, coming from an educational perspective,
we might identify and explore the creation of participative learning to address these
issues and what this also means in relation to “public” education.
With our focus on learning in post-compulsory education we have viewed learning
from the context of individuals’ learning whilst reflecting on the nature of those
organisations charged with providing education whilst using public funds, as well as
the contexts they operate within. Governed by local, national and international
policies and comparisons of outcome and performance e.g. OECD and EU
comparisons, organisations themselves are rarely engaged in policy formation nor
engaged in assessing the value and impact of the policies that they are subject to. Key

documents in English further education have been formulated and authored by
distinguished figures in the financial community e.g. Foster 2005 and Leitch 2006. It
is arguable that there is no nationally recognised manager or practitioner in further
education with a policy voice in England, because Government and funding agencies
see this sector as there to implement policy rather than helping to formulate and
assess the practical impact of policy. Consequently it is unsurprising if the
institutional context for learning does not exhibit learning life-cycles, nor
architectures of participation that enable informal, or web 2.0 based learning.
In contrast to this UK status quo we have proposed models of organisation that
promote the idea that provider organisations should be embedded in their localities
and engaged in networks of collaboration that help to ensure that they are able to
inform and influence policy and the evaluation of their activities. We argued that “as
part of e-mature collaborative networks, educational institutions will be able both to
influence the policy landscape in which they operate and find a way of resolving the
tensions between competition and collaboration generated by national policies and
practices, within their sector, to the benefit of their learners and communities.”
Ecclesfield and Garnett AoP October 2009
B) E-maturity
We had been exploring the e-maturity of providers in further education with fifteen
providers as part of the development of a self-assessment tool for organisations that
would help them prepare for, and manage, their responses to inspection by the
national inspectorates, and the associated demands made by funding agencies in their
audit processes. One college was using a participative tool called “webactions”, which

allowed all members of the college community to provide their feedback on all
aspects of the life of the institution, as they were recorded in various management
'action plans', and to make the commentary and feedback rapidly available to all parts
of the college community through agreed procedures using the college network.
“Webactions” encouraged immediate responses and dialogue between those
commenting and those carrying out key activities such as teaching, learner support
and management. The commentary and responses fed into wider discussions and
could be accessed at any time to provide a detailed account of college life and
progress towards external as well as internally generated objectives. In relation to
inspection, this college had moved from being considered to be 'poor' in a previous
cycle to 'outstanding' whilst using webactions and, prior to their engagement with the
e-maturity project, showing how providers could use their internal development
dialogues to both improve and also to cope with external requirements for information
and inspection itself.
Our learning from this project has been incorporated in Garnett and Ecclesfield
(2008), and subsequent work on the AoP blog, where we have argued that the internal
processes developed using webactions need to be reproduced in the interaction
between providers at community, regional and national levels, through active
networks that enable providers to address both internal and external developments.
They should be able to move from their current reactive stances to policy and
economic pressures exerted by their being individual institutions working in a
competitive climate that stifles co-operative and mutually supportive actions. Rather
than promoting such activity as means of improving the quality of learning and
teaching as well as other aspects of the operations of such organisations, current

funding and policy focuses on individual providers and consequently creates system
issues that fail to “join up” provision and engage learners as other than consumers.
C) Co-creating organisational development
Such an organisational “architecture of participation” would engage learners and
providers in the co-creation of organisational development and policy as the focus
would shift from the learner as 'consumer', in current “learner voice” initiatives (see
“New Challenges; New Chances 2011) to the engagement of learners as participants
in “more iterative dialogic structures" (Laurillard, 2012). Key to this movement will
be the reconceptualization of “public value”, which we discuss below. As Castells has
argued in his Communication Power, communications technology offers the
opportunity to re-programme existing networks of communication and thus, our ways
of managing our organisations (Castells 2010). In his latest work this is characterised
as being “to find ways for humans to manage collectively their lives according to
principles that are largely shared in their minds and usually disregarded in their
everyday experience” (Castells 2012 p246). By joining up the circuits of learning,
dialogue and policy formation through the experience of learners practitioners and
their communities, the architecture of participation provides the means to link the
disparate elements of our current education system, where learners and stakeholders
are valued for their financial “power” rather than their skills, knowledge and
experience.
The life-cycle model of institutional behaviour identified earlier, reflects many of
these dialogical elements, particularly the notion of co-creating organisational
development as institutional life-cycles evolve in response to demands from host
communities on what centre curricula should be. This allows us to conceptualise how

an adult learning institutional Architecture of Participation might include elements of
organisational e-maturity.
Organisational Architecture of Participation Issues and Public Value
It can be argued that the concern with audit processes in post-compulsory education
has led to a situation where lip service is paid to widely-referenced notions such as
learner voice and community engagement, but both are seen in practice as educational
consumer issues i.e. formal consultation and satisfaction surveys, rather than
providing the means through which learners and other stakeholders can express their
views about issues of concern to them, such as the impact of government policy or
feed their contributions into policy formation and review. In short, what Moore
describes as “public value” in his writings is nothing of the sort. His conception is
built on a view that sites the definition of the value of public services, including
education, as being specifically within the remit of senior managers in public services
and not embedded in a process that engages learners, practitioners and communities in
defining what is needed and in forming policy.
We have argued that the value of educational providers should be assessed and
validated through public deliberation and engagement and participative processes that
can be enabled and enhanced by the affordances of the new technologies. Castells, in
all of his recent writings, has explored the theory and practice of participation in the
context of current developments in technology and the use that can be made of the
affordances offered by the Internet and mobile technologies. See his discussion of
“power in the network society” (Castells 2009 pp 10 – 50).

Education providers in post-compulsory education in the UK are products of
hierarchical models of organisation and structure, reflecting the contexts in which
their curriculum offer and funding are determined and the models of inspection and
management that are promoted through national advisory agencies, inspection and
development training, where leadership is seen as a key factor in organisational
development. As we write this piece, a report on the failure of care in a large hospital
trust has pointed to failures in care caused by a management culture fixated on
“corporate self-interest, cost cutting and meeting unrealistic targets that were set
without regard to patient care.” (Francis 2013). What is interesting about the report is
that it identifies systemic failures resulting from
1. A culture focused on doing the system’s business – not that of patients
2. An institutional culture which ascribed more weight to positive information
about the service than to information capable of implying a cause for concern
3. Standards and methods of measuring compliance which did not focus on the
effect of a service on patients
The report will be noted as one of the most telling and significant repudiations of
managerialism and the use of inappropriate performance indicators in public services,
which we will explore, in detail in our blog.
The effect, in this case, was the unnecessary death of 400-1200 people and the
consequences of a similar failure in education would not have these consequences, but
education does affect people’s futures and yet we are still a long way from engaging

publics in determining their own futures and helping to determine how providers
should respond to their needs and prepare for the future.
In the context of education, which is a public service with diminishing public
engagement in its operations in the UK, it is the autonomy of “managers” that is
entrenched, while public, learner and practitioner engagement in the service is seen in
terms of meeting consumer needs and customer service, hence the emerging
developments in learner data analytics using administrative data gathered for audit
purposes as a substitute for engagement and participation by learners in determining
their own futures.
As Radin (Radin 2006) has noted, the processes for collecting data and the nature of
the data being collected in performance management systems can inhibit performance
and become barriers to participative enterprises to improve and develop public
services. Tess Lea takes this argument further by arguing that interventions governed
by bureaucratic and accountancy requirements are self-justifying as they are not
collaborative or participative in their intention or evaluation and professionals
involved in implementing policy are themselves bound up in policy in ways that
preclude the raising of fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of the
policies and the ethics of implementation.
Francis argues for organisations to “Ensure openness, transparency and candour
throughout the system about matters of concern” and the rest of this section will seek
to explore how this requirement could be applied in education.
For example, Sugata Mitra found, in his work around the world, within groups and
communities that the capacity to adopt, adapt and use information technology to

support learning is far greater than the expectations of those outside the communities
provided with the technology (Mitra 2010). When a focus on learning is centre-stage
attention moves away from those who provide resources on to what can be generated
by communities themselves, and the implications of that learning, rather than on audit
trails and activities that are governed by managerial and hierarchical relationships,
reliant on managers to conceive and deliver services and control organisations.
Mitra’s recent work shows how little the capacity of learners, combined with the
ability of supportive others, to initiate and sustain learning, has been considered in
educational theory and in the framing of provider organisations.
The key to creating participative organisations then will be in opening up the
organisations to public engagement whilst using technology to draw in the public to
discuss fundamental questions by publicising and making accessible the content and
the dynamic of those debates, as with webactions. As we note above, the use of
“webactions” provided a continuous means for developing and initiating discussion
on any matter affecting the providers using the tool and the means of drawing
together disparate views in a dialogic environment where participants had somewhat
more than a formal and intermittent value in the quality assurance systems, where
their contributions are turned on and off to meet external audit requirements rather
than the changing needs of persons and locales. The key here seems to be moving
away from the idea of stakeholders as customers to one which values them as
participants in the organisation and development of a provider and this would include
other providers who could be drawn into collaborative activity to extend the range and
scope of provision and draw in other participants for their knowledge and expertise as

well as to meet their needs – needs articulated through participation not interpreted
from market research.
Bound by formal processes and procedures about who leads and manages them,
formal structures and forums lead to organisational stasis and falling participation
exemplified in the disconnect, in most providers between formal “governance”,
learners, staff and other stakeholders resulting in disengagement as governing bodies
in English further education colleges remain bureaucratic in both operation and
purpose. Forums where learners and communities lead providers are rarely initiated,
with the exception of the Workers Education Association in England although
evidence would suggest that such approaches, where they are tried, lead to greater
breadth of provision and more dynamic organisations. We believe that this
organisational stasis produced by the managerialism model promoted by central
government in recent years is both inimical to enabling the participatory affordances
of social media and inappropriate to the institutional health of adult learning centres.
Key Issues for Adult Learning Institutions
We think that two key issues differentiate adult learning institutions from other
educational organisations; the temporary nature of the centres themselves and the
ever-changing networks in which they are situated. Firstly the institutions themselves
often have erratic histories because where they rely on funding regimes rather than
building on their own histories, with few staff (UK online centres for example) often
employing just one full-time professional, supported by several volunteers. Secondly
the networks within which they operate are themselves full of discontinuities,

depending on an ever-changing, and unreliable, mix of funding regimes, whilst the
individuals involved, as well as the user and community interests to be pursued, vary
over time. Consequently the tacit knowledge gained in running centres in adult
education are not embedded in managerial hierarchies, but typically reside in key
individuals or, in Information Ecology terms, the ‘keystone species’ (Nardi, 1994),
who themselves are often frantically involved operationally, working to complete
projects or just to keep centres open. Whist operating in this ‘deficit mode’, if they
have goals relating to social inclusion then they are often also covering for black
holes in institutional educational provision for the socially excluded. Whilst centres
themselves can evolve purposefully over the period of their own ‘Life Cycles’ the
knowledge about that evolution, which would help both to make sense of the changes
they are going through, and also help in their further development, often gets lost in
the relentless daily demands of managing a centre. (I’ve experienced this myself over
a period of eight years as a trustee of the Creekside Education Trust).
For adult learning centres then temporary “collaborations across boundaries”, rather
than our original formulation of a purposeful ‘agility’ demonstrated in ongoing
collaborative networks, might be a better way of describing their networked
relationships, or partnerships. Consequently the issue of partnership becomes one of
not only identifying more purposeful collaborations but also of obtaining a clearer
recognition of adult learning itself from existing stakeholders, funders and potential
partner institutions. We think that this might be characterised as rhizomatic behaviour
where the Adult learning institution maintains its character as it evolves through its,
hopefully, self-determined Life Cycle, but builds temporary, discontinuous alliances,
with other organisations. Unfortunately centres tend not to be purposefully

rhizomatic, that is building their own temporary alliances to evolve their own
activities purposefully, but are more usually opportunistically seeking funding, which
is often about meeting the purposes of others. If that funding comes with government
policy attached then the relationship can prove terminal.
“Embedding the culture of participation”
We think there are two key issues to build on in order to build a culture of
participation in Adult Learning Centres; hubs and training.
1 A distributed model of institutional Hubs connected to Adult Learning Centres
which recognises the Life Cycle independence of the centre and its constituents.
Following the requirement placed on OFCOM to ‘promote media literacy’ in 2003 a
participatory media literacy working group was established on which Fred Garnett
was the co-chair. This investigated how a national programme to promote
participative media literacy might be developed in line with the UK online
community centres model. It was proposed that as individual centres lacked
continuity key community media hubs would be needed as repositories of knowledge
and skills concerning digital media training. Hubs would follow the ‘Information
Centres’ model developed by IBM in the 1970s concerned with how business
organisations coped with new technology. In this model hubs would have new media
specialists, a full range of new technology and would organising skills training and
provide centre support. They would train workers from individual centres and advise
on the combination of tools and activities that each centre might need. Centres would
then be free to focus on their primary activities and be supported in their use of new
media technologies as and when it was required to meet their core business activities.

In this model centres could evolve naturally in line with the Life Cycles model, whilst
hubs kept abreast of new technology developments and advised.
2. Supporting and training support workers, staff or trusted intermediaries who will
be identified and nurtured to keep their knowledge and skills within that life cycle.
That training should be based on a social media participation model such as
Aggregate then Curate. In the MOSI-ALONG project the development of social
media skills in users was the responsibility of Digital Learning Champions which had
been co-ordinated across Manchester, in line with their community learning strategy,
by Walt Crowson of LSEN. The existence of these ‘trusted intermediaries’, usually
volunteers from the communities in which they lived, provided a real focus for the
project as they not only understood the need for training in social media, but also
knew how to talk to and train people in their neighbourhoods. In effect the MOSI-
ALONG project acted as a temporary social media hub for the duration of the project
(2011) but those support mechanisms disappeared once project funding ended.
Perhaps the best example of an adult learning group which represents the Life Cycle
model of development and has embedded a culture of participation is the Everything
Unplugged group which holds ‘learning conversations’ once a week. It is self-
organised, began as a Meetup group but now organises through Facebook. It has been
in existence for three years and has evolved variously (Everything Unplugged 2012),
but its’ purpose is self-determined and it has evolved in ways suggested by the Life
Cycle. It is a weak example on how to build an organisational AoP for a centre
because it has no funding and no location but this has allowed it to remain true to
itself and it is driven by social media practices.
Conclusion;

In The Future of Learning Institutions in the Digital Age (Davidson & Goldberg,
2009) Cathy Davidson asks whether ‘anyone (has) yet put into institutional practice at
the level of higher education what John Seely Brown is calling a “social life for
learning for the Net age”, which applies for all institutions and sectors of learning.
Davidson further comments that ‘no institute of higher education has tested in a
comprehensive way new methods of learning based on peer-to-peer distributed
systems of collaborative work’ which she describes as ‘characteristic of the new
Internet age’. She asks whether ‘the social networking possibilities (will) prompt
greater reflexivity, a more sustained sociality in which the positions and concerns of
the otherwise remote are more readily taken into consideration in decision-making.
We agree with Seely Brown that learning now has a ‘social life in the net age’ and
believe that both the Emergent Learning Model and the ambient learning city project
MOSI-ALONG where designed to identify and promote a social life of learning. And
we think that the answer to Davidson’s question ‘can we really say, in 2009, that the
institutions of learning – from pre-school to the Ph.D – are suited to the new forms of
learning made available by digital technologies’ are no, but that we are beginning to
address this question with the organisational architecture of participation proposed
here. We think the key test she identifies is whether learning in the ‘Net age’ is based
on ‘peer-to-peer distributed systems of collaborative work’, which our emergent
learning model designs for.
Addressing major infrastructural, cultural and organisational issues
We would conclude, from both our theoretical and practical work discussed, that we
can offer three big ideas, one each on infrastructural, cultural and organisational

issues, if we are to develop an appropriate institutional model for Adult Informal
eLearning.
a) Infrastructural; Whilst both Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Personal
Learning Environments and Networks (PLE and PLN) have roles to play in Adult
Learning the increasing technological development of smart phones and apps along
with access to cloud-based applications, along with the increasing user take-up of
social media such as Facebook, and their integration into new consumer products,
have meant that the web is increasingly being used as a publishing medium aligned
with these ever-changing consumer-driven client/server technological relationships.
Whilst much of this infrastructural change is about applications that simplify
everyday usage (e.g. Instagram posting digital images directly to the web) the
concomitant rise of social media aggregators such as Pinterest mean that basic
publishing and curating has become simplified. Beyond these cloud-based consumer
applications, which can be used in interest-driven learning contexts some tools, such
as xtlearn.net, have been explicitly developed to support curation as learning.
Xtlearn.net defines itself as ‘social scrapbooking. So our view is that the barriers to
entry to social media publishing have never been lower and adult informal eLearning
can now start from the personal use of social media, which aligns with our view of
informal learning works best when it is interest-driven. This eLearning process is
significantly helped by having trusted intermediaries, such as Digital Learning
Champions, who have had additional guidance and training and so have the
confidence in some of the tools and parts of the learning model, and can scaffold
interest-driven activities into learning.

b) Cultural; We think that these new affordances of social media mean that adult
learners now have greater practical choice of which tools and processes they can use
for their learning. In line with the emergent learning model we also think that learning
can be about content creation and content curation. However, as we found with
MOSI-ALONG, whilst new tools can enable new learning what is really needed are
new metaphors to help make sense and increase the potential of the new affordances
available to learners through social media. In MOSI-ALONG we used digital cabinets
of curiosities as we were working with a cultural institution, it is crucial that new
metaphors should have a contextual relevance. Any new metaphors developed should
be rooted in personal narratives, or contexts that make sense to those adult learners
involved.
c) Organisational. We think that existing adult learning institutions are at their best
when they responded to community learning needs and exhibit a Life Cycles process
of development. This is helped both by having a clear, and shared, sense of mission,
and also by developing agile partnerships with other providers, learners or emerging
social groups, which is often shaped by funding imperatives. This can be achieved, in
part, by using social media such as Facebook groups, or tools like NING or
xtlearn.net (amongst others).
However in writing this chapter and broadening the references to architectures of
participation it is clear that individual centres need supportive hubs, whether local,
national or regional, to enable their naturally emerging life-cycle to develop and
become community responsive.

There is also, as we have seen in the discussed throughout, a public policy dimension.
Indeed we think that, as a principle, it should be applied to all national funded
programmes concerning new technology and social media (lastfridaymob). Namely
that any initiative needs to have key people, typically those trusted intermediaries who
become the keystone species within any initiative, who should be brought together to
advise on programme design, provide support during its duration and provide
summative 360 degree evaluations at the end. In line with the principles of AoP they
should be drawn as much from professionals and volunteers working in adult learning
centres, as from funders and policy wonks working at the governmental level. There
is a long tradition of calling fit for purpose, however we think that solutions in net age
need to be ‘fit for context’ We think our proposed solution is a model that can become
‘fit for context’.
In our experience there have been a number of national and local bodies who have
acted as hubs, or keystone species, in adult learning initiatives, and most have since
been disbanded. The work mentioned above on the Digital Divide Content Strategy
was developed in a collaboration from two of these, Becta's UK Community
Programmes team, which was closed in 2005, and the CTCnet group in the USA, both
of whom were providing support nationally for community technology programmes.
CTCnet were supported by BEV, in West Virginia, and the City Government
Community Technology Team who, uniquely, developed Healthy Life Indicators to
measure the well-being of their citizens as they took up the use of digital
technologies, a truly dialogical initiative. This critical, and usually missing, element
of adult learning hubs needs to re-instigated if we are to develop responsive, engaging
and, embedded adult learning centres that offer appropriate informal learning
opportunities in the digital age, using social media and supportive collaborations in

ways that we are beginning to understand pedagogically, and which meet the needs of
the communities they serve in a mutually developmental relationship.
Processes and tools Adult Educationalists can use in practice
What we have tried to do in this paper is to address equally research issues,
theoretical concepts and practical issues, and in keeping with that approach we would
like to provide a summative list of recommendations for anyone involved in the
design of adult learning for the net age, in line with our three main conclusions.
a) Infrastructural;
1. Arrange social media surgeries to de-mystify social media tools
2. Use the Aggregate then Curate model to design or review informal learning
3. Identify new social media that support learning outcomes, Pinterest, xtlearn.net,
Instagram etc
b) Cultural;
4. Think of new metaphors appropriate to the learning context (such as museums),
personal histories of people involved, or allow them to emerge from open debate in
workshops.
5. Use a curation model of content creation to simplify the learning process
6. Encourage collaboration and peer-mentoring to emerge in the learning process, but
don’t force this on participants
c) Organisational.

7. Crowd-source your learning curriculum and develop a ‘community-responsive
curriculum’, ‘or community as curriculum’ (Cormier, 2010)
8. Think of web-based publishing as your new accreditation model, but follow Clay
Shirky’s advice ‘publish then filter’
9. Allow your institution to evolve its mission iteratively based on the learning
lifecycles experienced by learners, support staff and the institution itself (with the
help of supportive hubs)

Resources
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Xtlearn.net, http://xtlearn.net/Info/
WEA Webinar
CPD
Evidence; proven practice with impact
Funding to develop & share that practice further
Share practice as it emerges
Communities of practice
4 Aims;
1. Support governing bodies Leadership teams and managers
2. 3.
4. Collaborative partnerships (line of site to work)
Governance - see page 7 of the guidance ONE
a) Boards role in agreeing a tech strategy
b) key questions for governors to ask to ensure ROI
c) Develop an implementation model
d) Develop a capability framework
Leadership Teams see page 8 of the guidance TWO
How to develop a culture of change
Develop Business skills
Address strategic challenges of the sector
Develop and address the leadership development needs that will ensure strategic
development of learning tech
AND LINE of Sight to Work
Education and Employer engagement TWO
1 Model innovative collaborative
2 blended learning in the work place
3 mobile in the workplace
4 simulate
5 assessment aligned to innovative practice
6 tech to expand apprentice capacity
Target audiences; ACL Employers FE WBL Prison HEI Schools
Interview plan Feb 9/10 in London
So a key dimension of these projects is to model best practice so it can be shared
Build partnerships to share that best practice
Project Plan;
TIME Inception Meeting 27th
Feb to September 30th
2015 – 8 months max
Finance Plan
PROJECT ASSESSMENT will be;

Existing partnership can bid – funding to lead organisation
ANNEX 1 is key (assessment weighting of bids)
• Partnership as key for SHARING Best Practice
• Must be scaleable ideas & processes (accessibility) (low cost)
• Evidence existing best practice
• Transferable
SHOW
1. Project alignment with funding aims of programme
2. Project outcomes
3. Transferability & scalability as a dissemination strategy
4. Project management (tight time scales)
5. Value for money
GREAT applications
Write crisply READ Section 5 p7-9 is key
• Identify areas to develop
• Develop PLan
• Impact measures
• Data collection
• Analyse Data
• Modify initial theory & repeat
Support for successful projects
Each project will have an LF Project Champion for support
How will you transform the capacity & capability if the workforce to use learning
technologies to improve outcomes for learners and employers

Towards an Adult Learning Architecture of Participation

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