This chapter looks at where this ambition started with the national UK project called the E-Maturity Framework for Further Education (EMFFE). This project ran for 18 months with a brief to design an e-learning ready institutional model that UK, English, Further Education Colleges and other providers of post-compulsory education could adopt, both individually and as a sector working as adaptive institutions across collaborative networks. This chapter examines in detail the elements that make up this development framework for vocational colleges and post-compulsory education providers (provided in full in the Appendix) from which the authors developed the idea of organizational architectures of participation, which drives this book.
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The first part of the book was concerned with the process of developing an approach to designing future digital learning projects that was based on learner-modelling. We started with modelling “informal e-learning” and developed our thinking into a “meta-model of learning” called the Emergent Learning Model which was concerned with integrating formal, non-formal and informal learning in line with the Bologna Process brief from the EU.
The second part of the book examines how we might design learning infrastructures in the round, starting with the institutions of education.
This chapter concerns the fate of some of the hopes raised by the development of the Internet, known as Web 2.0 and the discussions surrounding the use of digital technologies in educational settings that were burgeoning in the year 2000. In the previous decade, in the UK, had seen an unprecedented rise in the use of digital technologies within the education system in the UK that engaged practitioners like ourselves and saw growing investment in equipment, training and infrastructure. The potential of computers for learning and teaching had been championed by Governments and multinational bodies such as the European Union throughout the period leading up to 2000 and this was supported by funding for all sectors of education, notably in post-compulsory education where the potential of computers for learning for those of all ages and circumstances was recognised and promoted in the UK, USA, Canada and Australasia and other countries. Such developments in England, USA and Canada for adult and informal education have been explored by Ian Harford in his book “Digital Nations in the Making” Harford 2006