Education department reshuffle: DIUS goes into DBIS

As part of last week’s cabinet re-shuffle, the department responsible for the UK’s skills was once again re-shuffled. As Number 10 put it:

The Government has today created a new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills whose key role will be to build Britain’s capabilities to compete in the global economy. The Department will be created by merging BERR and DIUS.

Hhm … that will be the same government that created DIUS (the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills) two years ago at a reported cost of £7m.

Nobody’s fooled by the ‘merger’ talk. BERR is the dominant party here. The result: universities in particular are up in arms about the supposed subsidiary role that universities are now supposed to play to business. At least, that’s the view of the Guardian’s excellent Polly Curtis, according to her minute-by-minute posting of the day’s events last Friday.

Actually this is both a good move and a bad move, but not for the reasons that universities are apparently complaining about.

All ready for the Learning and Skills Group Conference

Next Tuesday sees the Learning and Skills Group Conference at Olympia in London. We have a great line up of speakers, including:

• Gordon Bull – former head of L&D at Vodafone
• Tony Buzan – inventor of Mind Mapping
• Jay Cross – learning visionary and champion of informal learning
• Jane Hart – social media learning luminary
• Nigel Paine – former head of L&D at the BBC
• Clive Shepherd – Mr e-learning

What a line up! And there are plenty of other speakers, too, with some exciting stories to share. It’s a great programme, but we haven’t made much of a fuss about it. Nonetheless, the conference is completely full.

What’s going on?

Simple – the event is guaranteed to fill up, because it is one of the benefits of membership of the Learning and Skills Group (LSG). Members have to have attended the Learning Technologies Conference in the previous January, or can apply.

It will be a very busy day, with 7 concurrent interactive events occurring at any time. I am looking forward to it immensely, and I’ll post afterwards to say how it’s gone.

We are top of the league! Performance management in practice…

Yes, it’s true. Belmont Academicals are top of the league.

My Thursday night 5-a-side team has won its first two games of the new season, bagging us 6 points and placing us firmly at the top of the ‘Premiership’, the very pinnacle of all British 5-a-side football teams. Or at least, those playing in Turnham Green, London, on a Thursday night.

During our last spell in the Premiership we managed a miserable 3 points over 10 games, with an average of 2.3 goals per game.

Last night we scored 9 and conceded one.

So what has changed?

Is training dead? Part 2

Is training dead? Not in Ireland, apparently, although if you believed the news, you couldn’t imagine anything surviving the current economic blight.

Yesterday I keynoted at the Irish Computer Society’s National IT Training Conference in Dublin. According to the local media, and just about anyone you talk to, the Irish economy is in meltdown.

The taxi drivers, the barmen and even the hotel staff, everyone told the same story: the housing bubble has burst, bringing down government income and forcing up unemployment.

This is more than just a bit of complaining or the love of a good story. The headline on the Irish Independent on the Aer Lingus flight out was We’ve never had it so bad. Unemployment is likely to top 500,000 soon and national income to fall by 14% over the three years from 2008 to 2010 – the worst three year drop in any developed country since the 1930s.

Training’s been hit, too, as the government has withdrawn funding for training programmes, and employers and individuals have cut back on spending.

Yet about 200 people took time out to attend the ICS Skills event, and although they were realistic about the current situation, they were also intent on surviving it. Plenty of them – in the private and public sectors – have seen downturns before. Many referred to the 1980s, the time of the last bad downturn, and talked of the very practical ways they plan to ride out this rough patch.

From the training magazine that folded in print format, only to relaunch online, to the school that’s creating its own interactive whiteboards rather than pay for expensive imported items. From the drop-in centre for the unemployed finding ways to carry on regardless to the innovative learning technology start ups, there is plenty of fight here, and plenty of good news, too.

On the way back to the airport my taxi driver took me past huge patches of land cleared for construction that may now never happen, and the vast Ikea store that is apparently empty and unwanted by a population that has no plans for redecoration at the moment.

Things are tough in Ireland right now, no mistake, but nobody’s giving up just yet.

Stephen Heppell and Tate Modern

I spent a very pleasant morning on Friday at Tate Modern, courtesy of e-learning provider IMC. After the normal registration coffee we had a fifty-minute tour of the Tate (or a small part of it, at least) followed by a discursive presentation from Prof. Stephen Heppell entitled ‘The Art of Learning’.

Now this is not your normal way of approaching a conference or a briefing. The normal drill is: turn up, drink some coffee, chat, listen, chat, leave. You don’t normally walk out of the meeting room before the main event to wander through an exhibition and hear an expert guide talk you through each a collection of challenging mostly abstract art.

And yet, strangely, it worked. Of course Prof. Heppell is an experienced speaker, with a great deal to say, all backed up by experience. One of his themes was the need to change our learning spaces in schools in order to change the way pupils learn, and he led a fascinating discussion on this.

The discussion, however, would not have been as wide-ranging, I believe, without the gallery tour beforehand. It acted as the equivalent of a mental warm-up, getting us out of whatever mindset we were in before we arrived, prompting us to look beyond the obvious, and to challenge our existing thinking.

This business of learning by walking about and chatting was absolutely in line with Prof. Heppell’s message, but I reckon that any event could benefit from a beginning that asked people to use their minds a little differently, on a subject matter which they would never normally encounter in their working day.

The MEN Media Skills Matrix Redundancies

There has been much electronic comment this morning about a piece in the Guardian saying that MEN Media, which publishes the Manchester Evening News, will be using a skills matrix to decide on who to keep (or not) in a round of 150 redundancies.

What exactly are they doing? What will it mean and will it work?

Is training dead? Part 1

Is training dead? That’s the question I’ll be asking in my keynote at the Irish Computer Society’s National IT Training Conference in Dublin on 30th April.

Is it dead? No, of course not. It’s just evolving.

That, though, provokes some questions: what’s it evolving from? What’s it evolving into? And what’s causing the change?

Tweet of the Week

There’s a lot of odd stuff on Twitter, but having been playing with it for a few months it seems like I’ve got in the groove finally and this week have seen some good stuff coming by.

What was the best of it? A close second was the revelation that Twitter was invented in 1935: http://is.gd/lqVp and they had a business model! (hjarche retweeting @zecool @eogez).

But the coveted Tweet of the Week award goes to moehlert (retweeting @stoweboyd) for The Cult Of Done!. If you’re struggling to get anything done, visit the Cult for inspiration. 

The Cult of Done showed me something. Beyond the the usual moaning about planes and trains, those vital updates on people’s dining habits and a welter of excited tips on Twitter tools, something happened this week. Twitter acted as an accelerator of distribution. The Cult of Done has generated 72 comments in under 48 hours. I reckon that’s mostly on the back of re-tweeting.

If your idea goes viral on Twitter, expect some decent traffic.

How long before corporate marketing gets on the bandwagon?

The return of the Individual Learning Account?

Government funding for skills has been in the news a bit recently, what with the 2010 demise of the LSC (Learning and Skills Council) looming large and many sector skills councils facing the long, difficult process of relicensing to ensure they have funding for another few years.

When things get rough like this, the normal thing is to muddy the waters by producing another initiative, in this case many are speculating that it will be The return of the Individual Learning Account in some guise. The rationale: individuals, not governments, are best at deciding what to learn.

That would take another few years to prove a disaster, by which time ministers will have moved on and nobody be available to take the blame.

Buzan, Birthdays and Conferences

We were lucky enough to have Tony Buzan, the inventor of mind maps, open the Learning Technologies Conference this week on Wednesday, 28th January.

It’s not often that you have someone speak that generates the sort of reaction that Tony Buzan does. Everyone seems to have read and used his books – in particular Use Your Head.

In the run up to the conference, several people told me that this book and the technique of mind-mapping had changed their lives. In particular, I was told, they had realised on reading it that they weren’t stupid, that it was possible to learn in different ways.

Anyway, Wednesday, 28th January also happened to be my birthday. I didn’t say anything to the audience as I opened the conference - it’s my job to stay in the background. However, I had mentioned my birthday to Tony the evening before over dinner.

On wrapping up his presentation,  Tony mentioned that this was an auspicious day. Not only was the Learning Technologies Conference 10 years old, but it was also Don Taylor’s birthday.

And he then led the audience of about 350 people in a spirited rendition of Happy Birthday to You.

It was a very happy moment, if slightly odd. After all, it really is my job to get everyone else into the limelight, but I enjoyed it and thanked the crowd.

Now it is late Friday afternoon, the weekend is here, and the conference is behind us. I am looking forward to relaxing a little and enjoying some postponed birthday treats with the family. But being serenaded by Tony Buzan wasn’t a bad way to start the celebrations.