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agile learning
Conversations about Learning
Featuring interviews with
Dougald Hine
Co-founder of the Schoolof Everything
Page 3
 Annie Weekes
Home educator
Page 6
David Jennings
Consultant in onlinelearning and discovery
Page 4
Tony Hall
Photographer, learningevangelist and reluctantteacher
Page 5
Fred Garnett
London Knowledge Lab &Learner-GeneratedContexts Research Group
Page 10
Ollie Nørsterud Gardener 
Enterprise learningentrepreneur
Page 9
January 2011
Unplugged!
Dick Moore
Consultant & former Director of Technology, Ufi/learndirect
Page 8
PLUS
David Gauntlett
Professor of Media & Communications, author of 
Making is Connecting
Page 7
 
Improvisationandimagination
The interviews in this newspaper wereconducted by David Jennings andoriginally published on his blogbetween June and December 2010 —see http://is.gd/jTr06 for the full onlineversions.
When I did the first of these inter-views, I didn’t see it becoming partof a newspaper. The journey fromhere to there has been a story notso much of Eureka moments but of a gradual series of small, impro-vised steps. Producing the news-paper has been just one more of those steps, a staging point to helpreflect on the direction of traveland decide where to go next.I’m incredibly grateful to theinterviewees for their time and in-sights, and especially to the mem- bers of the School of Everything’s‘Unplugged’ group who have fur-ther distilled the original versionsand helped present them in an al-ternative format that makes newconnections and strengthens grow-ing ones.The rough plan I originallysketched for seeding a ‘lightweightlearning’ community of practiceincluded a fancy Semantic Me-diaWiki implementation ratherthan a newspaper. But let’s wind back a little bit further still.In 2009, my friend and regularassociate Seb Schmoller suggestedwe start to think about what weshould do in the event that the cli-ents for our consulting work —predominantly public sector edu-cation organisations — were tohave their budgets savagely cut orabolished. The first instinct, ratherthan to rethink our own businessmodel, was to treat this budg-etlessness as just another problemfor which we could provide solu-tions. Hmmm.So began an effort to researchwhat had hitherto been an unex-amined intuition: that a lot of learning technology developmentswere throwing money at heavy-weight infrastructure and over-complicated content-developmentthat did more to constrain learningthan to liberate it. When money istight, we reasoned, much can still be done using what’s available on-line for relatively little or no cost:•collaboration environments,from build-your-own socialnetworks to wikis and evenold-fashioned email lists, and•free learning resources, fromKhan Academy and iTunes U tothe Open University’s Open-Learn initiative and what’savailable on the open web.Using lightweight, low-costtools, we felt, should also free uporganisations and groups to proto-type and experiment with alterna-tive approaches — and also putlearners more genuinely in controlof their own learning, tapping intotheir deeper motivations at thesame time as giving them scope to be more playful and creative.There’s no unique insight here,and many have been making thesepoints for years. The interviewshighlights ideas and experienceswith roots going back several dec-ades.But usable examples and guid-ance in areas such as adult, work- based learning (where I do muchof my work) are still hard to find.There’s a sense that many are com-ing to similar conclusions from dif-ferent starting points. Sometimesthey’ve put a name and a dis-course to what they’re doing —like ‘Edupunk’ in US higher edu-cation — while others are just feel-ing their way towards solutions totheir immediate problems.We’re at a moment where theseactions are starting to knit to-gether. I decided to interview somepeople who were doing interestingthings in disparate areas, as mycontribution to doing the knitting.Dick Moore was my first inter-viewee. At that stage, I expectedmost of the interviews to focus onthe combination of methods andtechnologies that Dick talks about.The last of the interviews, with Ol-lie Nørsterud Gardener, returns tosimilar territory, but along the wayI relearned that lesson that we allpay lipservice to, but too often for-get in practice:
it’s not about thetechnology
.
 Many are coming to simi-lar conclusions from dif- ferent starting points…these actions are startingto knit together
2
Agile Learning: Unplugged issue, 2011
Representation,Reflection,Relationships
A new three Rs for education?
 
Knitting people and ideas to-gether takes time. It’s all about re-lationships. At around the sametime that Seb Schmoller and I be-gan our discussions, I started at-tending the Unplugged meetups inthe Royal Festival Hall. Those twostrands and the series of inter-views in this paper graduallytwined together. Dougald Hineand Tony Hall are founder mem- bers of the meetups. David Gaunt-lett was first a guest and then amember, while Fred Garnett has become a member and Ollie Gar-dener an overseas visitor since Iinterviewed each of them. So, forme anyway, these interviews areshort clips from a broader, morefar-reaching conversation.
Context andconversation
Fred Garnett gives an overview of thisseries of interviews and what they sayabout the state of learning.
Prescience, collapse and reflection
This newspaper presents someconversations about learningwhich promote the generic idea of  being agile in the face of new con-straints. The origins for these re-flections lie within David Jen-nings’s and Seb Schmoller’s earlierdiscussions about the impact of austerity on learning provision,whilst, back in 2006, Dougald Hineand Paul Miller were wonderingwhat might become useful after amajor global economic crisis.Out of these concerns the Schoolof Everything emerged and thenSchool of Everything Unpluggedallowed the conversations in thispaper to occur.Some of the original thoughts,rooted in creating new ways of us-ing technology, were that light-weight tools might enable an agileapproach to learning to emerge; aniterative learning process linkinglearners to their goals dynamically.Agile might also allow a scaling-down of learning to match thehuman experience rather than thescaling up of institutions attempt-ing to engage with financial oppor-tunities that globalisation seemedto offer.
Small pieces loosely joined
Dick Moore takes his under-standing of the Agile Learningprocess from the
Agile Manifesto
 (2001), focusing on the notion of ‘the ability to change specificlearning goals as issues arise’.However, whilst he values agile asa contextualising process based onwhat he calls ‘agile core skills’ anditerative learning, he is cautiousabout whether agile actually brings about deep learning.David Jennings takes this viewof agile core skills deeper by look-ing at how we might change therelationship with the authority of the teacher, offering a vision of learners contracting in to learning,using the basket of techniques thatAgile might offer to self-organisetheir learning.Agile seems to offer a ‘smallpieces loosely joined approach’,exemplified by David Gauntlett,who is a serious advocate of theconvivial use of Lego as part of his
 Making is Connectin
g work. Davidis concerned to create a socialprocess of learning that promotesactive engagement with the envi-ronment and he uses tools to en-able collaborative learning to oc-cur. He also sees consequences be-yond the classroom, by engagingwith the Transition Towns move-ment, for example.Fred Garnett focuses on howthat ability to craft learning col-laboratively requires a set of bro-kering skills in teachers, which arenot commonly part of their profes-sional skillset. He sees this as partof their responsibility to enablelearners to generate their own con-texts for learning.
School? That’s a weird idea!
Tony Hall, on the other hand,doesn’t see teaching as a craft; hesees craft as learning. Tony is in-terested in how you enable learn-ing in extra-institutional contextsthrough conversations aroundpeople’s interests. As Tony is aphotographer, he works with peo-ple’s pictures. He is interested inthe person who takes the picture,and the image is a way into con-versations about their reality.Ivan Illich’s
Deschooling Society
 ideas are another thread runningthrough these Agile conversations,reaching an apotheosis with home-educators Annie and Guy whodon’t distinguish between learningand not-learning. They see thatlearning is always improvisedaround interests as they occur atany time of day; so much so thatAnnie now thinks that it is schoolthat seem like a weird idea.Ollie Nørsterud Gardener hasapplied social networking tools toproject and knowledge manage-ment within organisations to try toenable organisational learning, es-pecially peer-to-peer learning aspart of using her company’s Nod-dlePod service. Ollie is applyingemergent learning techniques toinstitutions as she doesn’t believeyou can ‘develop’ employees, theyneed to understand their needsand drive their own learning.
 Agile: the basket case for learning
So Agile Learning might best beseen as a basket of techniques,tools, processes and attitudes — allof which are discussed here —which, when used responsibly andsensitively, might enable betterself-organisation of learning.
To learn,to teach
Dougald Hine brought a wide range of interests and experiences to his role asco-founder of the School of Everything, an internet startuplaunched in 2008 with the aim of connecting people who can teach topeople who want to learn.In 2009, Dougald and Tony Hallstarted the series of weekly meetingsabout learning from which a few of these interviews grew. And thisdiscussion took place in our usual spotlooking out over the River Thames from the Royal Festival Hall.
David Jennings: What ambitionsdid you have in creating Schoolof Everything?
 Dougald Hine : I’d been readingIvan Illich’s
Deschooling Society
Overall Agile Learning providesa deconstruction of education intoits miscellaneous parts, such that itoffers the possibility that learnerscould re-aggregate the relevantsmall pieces to meet their self-identified learning goals or inter-ests. At the present time, one of so-cial and economic collapse, Agileoffers fresh ways of thinking aboutlearning that might enable newand socially useful modes of learn-ing to emerge.and getting very into Illich gener-ally. I’d met Paul Miller (nowSchool of Everything CEO), whohad heard of Illich via his work ona pamphlet called the
Pro-AmRevolution
.There was a sense that a numberof us were rediscovering theseolder ideas about the possibilityand the desirability of meetingmore of our needs outside of pre-scriptive institutions.Paul and I and the other Schoolof Everything founders originallycrossed paths through our in-volvement in a weekly emailnewsletter called
Pick Me Up
.
Pick Me Up
was a recipe for fun.To write a story for it, you had to be actively involved in makingsomething happen. You told thestory of what you’d done in a waythat might encourage others to usewhat you had shared to help themdo something.
 Agile Learning: Unplugged issue, 2011
3
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