There’s Good eLearning and There’s Bad eLearning: how do we tell one from the other?

Posted on | June 29, 2009 | 10 Comments

You know how it is. You are invited to deliver a keynote at a conference and you have to come up with a topic and a title at short notice, so you think of something that sounds interesting (you hope) and that will give you scope for an interesting talk.

Chris Evans, of Brunel University, kindly invited me to speak at a conference on eLearning taking place at Brunel next Monday (6th) - I’m taking a day out of my holiday to attend, and I am looking forward to it. I chose my topic many weeks ago and I’m currently having some fun thinking through the scope of the talk I want to give around the title of:

There’s Good eLearning and there’s Bad eLearning: how do we tell one from the other?

My approach - aside from some wariness about the term ‘eLearning’ itself - will be to explore those features and characteristics of online learning, in its widest definition, that I believe match or fall short of a sound philosophy of learning. Of course, such an approach will be highly subjective, but I hope to raise a few issues that will give those attending something to talk about.

I want to look at issues as diverse as ‘creepy treehouse syndrome‘, the folly of ‘community building’ as opposed to ‘community growing’ (Stephen Downes, as you might expect, is strong on this issue), the centrality of network learning, the power and importance of ‘unlearning’, and the changing nature of what it means to be educated today (a topic I have written and spoken about before - see here for instance). I also intend to take a potshot or two at the corporate form of eLearning so beloved of large (and not-so-large) firms around the world.

Any thoughts, ideas, provocations on this topic would be more than welcome!

Technorati Tags: elearning, brunel university, chris evans, conference

Category: education, ict, learning, personal, philosophy

Music and Newspapers: both praying to the wrong god?

Posted on | June 21, 2009 | 2 Comments

The music industry does what any industry would do when their precious commodity – in this case music – is suddenly as available as paper towels at your local YMCA restroom. It’s a scary place to find yourself. The natural reaction is to wrap your arms around that content and hold on for dear life. After all, it is your bread and butter.

As a result, the music industry lights a ring of fire around its content and fires on sight at anyone that tries to steal it. All of their energy and focus is spent to somehow contain the damage and retaining the perceived value of their content.

Because content is where all the value lies right? Wrong.

As Richard Ziade says, in this basement.org piece, the music industry, in their desparate response to the digital revolution, have been praying to the wrong god.

And he warns that, where the music industry has already trodden, the newspaper industry looks like following:

Newspapers, magazine publishers and book publishers are the new music industry; worrying and fretting and battling to protect their content.

If content is not king, what is? Ziade’s piece tells it like it is.

Technorati Tags: richard ziade, music industry, apple, amazon, newspaper industry

Category: amazon, apple, business, content, economy, innovation, media, music, technology

Hope, when it dies, dies in the gutter

Posted on | June 21, 2009 | 3 Comments

I have not watched the video on Facebook showing the terrible dying moments of a young Iranian woman, struck in the chest by a bullet as she and her father stood more than a mile from the main protests in Tehran - I will watch it if I can get my mind past the merely-voyeuristic aspects of doing so.

However, Steven Weber has watched it and has written an eloquent and moving piece for the Huffington Post in response. His response demonstrates, better than I can describe, why we should all watch this young woman die so that we can all consider carefully all those elements of the human condition that bring such dreadful events about.

This scene has been played over and over throughout history, its repetition inciting callous comparisons by well-off fat-cats to prove an inane point, or the stuff of bleak, black jokes; so commonplace is the inhumanity. Governments routinely either support or decry such acts, rarely, if ever, aware of their own complicity or their own mortality. They are, as their policies of control over the masses have proven, fatally corrupt and exist only because they are allowed to through sheer force.

And every political argument begins with its impact upon a single life and no clearer is that truth more evident than in this video.

For the moment, Steven Weber’s description is enough for me, but perhaps I owe it to the Iranian woman, and to every other innocent victim of human stupidity and cruelty, to watch her die, and to think about why we do such appalling things.

Technorati Tags: iran, huffington post, steven weber, hope, humanity

Category: personal

Playing Games for Scottish Education

Posted on | June 19, 2009 | 4 Comments

We are….currently working with the University of Abertay, Scottish Screen and major players in the IT industry on a project to build a community of practice and research around the design and development of computer games. Behind this project is the desire to generate a cultural shift in young people away from consuming digital media produced by other people towards becoming the designers, producers, authors and developers of the future.

If you want the chance to work at the cutting edge of ICT in Scottish education, then the secondment offered by LT Scotland at the moment - Develoment Officer, Glow Computer Games - might be for you. Not only would you get the chance to add to Scotland’s growing reputation in this rich field, but you would also have the opportunity to work with one of the smartest, funniest and nicest people in Scottish education: Derek Robertson.

Derek has been leading the Consolarium for Learning and Teaching Scotland since its foundation and has built an international reputation in the exciting areas of handheld learning and games.

And the post?

This post will work with partners in the project to fully exploit the potential of Glow to support young people in the area of games design. It is anticipated that software tools and environments for most of the popular computer games platforms will be available within Glow as well as access to a range of games companies who will act as mentors.

The closing date for applications is 1st July, so get going if you are interested. On the other hand, don’t bother applying if you don’t think we can combine real fun with powerful learning in Scottish education

Technorati Tags: ltscotland, glow, computer games, scottish education, consolarium

Category: education, fun, glow, ict, scotland, technology

A Dispassionate View of Comprehensive Education?

Posted on | June 17, 2009 | 1 Comment

So, Ralph Tabberer, the former Director-General of Schools in England who now ‘works for the world’s biggest chain of fee-paying schools’ (GEMS Education, based in Dubai), told the Daily Telegraph that:

…the comprehensive system was ‘not working’ and [that] Britain risked being overtaken by developing nations…

It’s always good to hear a dispassionate view on this particular subject, especially from someone who has no interest in ’selling’ private education into developing countries. His neutral, fair-minded stance allows him to advise us that:

…the future of education could only be assured by increased involvement of the private sector…

Thank goodness we found out in time.

I wonder if the Tele misquotes him, since here in Scotland the comprehensive system is still very much alive and working well - or did he think he was DG for all of Britain’s schools when he strode the corridors of Whitehall? Did no one tell him?

Technorati Tags: ralph tabberer, gems education, comprehensive education, private education, daily telegraph

Category: education, elitism, government, schooling, scotland, society

“It worked for us” - a selfish parent speaks!

Posted on | June 16, 2009 | 3 Comments

The obnoxious remark above came from a selfish, unrepentant and, frankly, rather stupid parent on BBC Scotland news this evening. She had just successfully appealed to have her little darling admitted to Sciennes Primary School in Edinburgh from outwith the school’s catchment area, thereby making a nonsense of Edinburgh City Council’s brave and wholly rational attempt to keep classes within a reasonable size in this and other popular schools.

Sciennes is, I have no doubt, a very good school, but it is only one of scores of very good primary schools in Edinburgh, and one of many hundreds across the country. This woman, and others like her, are stupid because they believe that their child will get a better education in one of these popular schools than in whichever local schools they would be sending their children to were they a little more sensible. Their belief is unfounded since the policies and actions of HMIE, local authorities and the schools themselves in Scotland over the past two-and-a-half decades have ensured that the variation in school quality across the country is now really very slight indeed. In any case, any variation there might be in quality, I would contend, is just as likely to occur within a school, between teachers, than between schools (and that includes these incipient magnet schools).

Sciennes Primary School, of course, is situated in one of the more obviously middle-class parts of Edinburgh. This woman’s decision, I would warrant, had little to do with educational choice, and everything to do with social snobbery and middle-class cachet.

This is an issue ripe for legislation by the Scottish Government - it is high time that these corrosive remains of Thatcherite educational policy were rolled back to a point that will enable Scottish local authorities to implement sensible school catchment area and class-size policies without having to cope with the destructive actions of self-serving elitists such as these. The alternative is that Scottish education will drift inexorably towards the dreadful situation now existing in so many parts of England where so-called ’school choice’ policies have polarized schooling to an extent that is probably now impossible to reverse.

Technorati Tags: school choice, school catchments, elitism, snobbery

Category: education, elitism, ethics, law, politics, principle, schooling, scotland, society

Civilization: A Voyage, not a Harbour

Posted on | June 15, 2009 | No Comments

Anyone who can write the following deserves to be read further:

China already is second world, but is climbing up from the third. Europe is absorbing its second world periphery, seeking to elevate it to the first world. Could America, long the first-world icon, slip into the second world?

When it is a paid-up, bona fide member of the Washington research community who writes it, I for one am hooked.

Khanna, as an Indian-American, born in Kanpur, is perhaps able to bring a level of detachment to an assessment of the position of the USA in international relations that other American commentators might find harder to achieve. He ponders the current global geopolitical picture and related questions in the course of what I think has to be the best book I have read for a couple of years at least. The clarity of his writing, and therefore of his thinking, is a joy to read. It is a clarity that appears effortless but it has a solid base in research, his own and others’, and in a set of first principles drawn from important works in this and contiguous fields, such as Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History and Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West.

Khanna’s thesis revolves around the emergence in recent years of a triumvirate of global superpowers, namely the USA, China and the European Union. Of the three, he is probably most enamoured with the model being pursued by the EU, as it gradually expands the European social-democratic model into the former Soviet-bloc countries, possibly into Turkey in time, and perhaps even into some parts of North Africa (directly or indirectly). It is a model that deploys a combination of powerful carrot and persuasive stick. The carrot is entry into the biggest market in the world, and the stick is the need to bend to the economic, political and social standards that have to be met before membership can be conferred. China, too, in a different context, is using a not dissimilar carrot and stick model in its efforts to pull South-East Asia within its hegemony.

Khanna contrasts these approaches with the US (written before Obama’s election to the Presidency):

A superpower doesn’t last a minute longer than it has to. America has long held the military capacity to pulverize its competitors into dust……[but] America has failed on every single count to resolve the major threats it has identified, revealing the impotence of military power. Furthermore, American influence has diminished most quickly where its posture is the most militarized: the Arab world and East Asia.

The emerging tri-polarity, Khanna argues, requires a new form of equilibrium, an equilibrium that:

….requires that the United States, the EU and China together determine the rules of the geopolitical game.

It is a situation continually in flux, but one that needs to be recognized as a process, ongoing and never-ending. He quotes Toynbee to the effect that civilization:

…is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour.

Within this broad argument, Khanna shines a light on many countries and regions around the world, coolly assessing their geopolitical import against the new global balancing act (his matter-of-fact prediction of the demise of Iraq as a single national entity is just one amongst many such insights and intriguing predictions).

I think this is an important book and one that should be read and digested by anyone with an interest in the changing international order - and it should be required reading by those who would tamper with the core purpose and rationale of the European Union. Equally, anyone with an interest in the shifting boundaries between first and second worlds, and between second and third worlds, will find much to consider within its pages.

Technorati Tags: parag khanna, second world, european union, china, usa, geopolitics

Category: change, economics, economy, emerging regions, history, politics, power, security

The Delusion of Status-Conferred Authority

Posted on | June 14, 2009 | 26 Comments

That small group of far-thinking Scottish educationists who came up with the idea of TeachMeet knew what they were doing when they established the basic form and function of the concept: an informal gathering of equals designed to give a platform to everyone who wanted to be heard, a firm foundation in the practices of teaching and learning, an opportunity to teach others and to learn from others in a mutually supportive, non-prescriptive atmosphere. It promoted a recognition that we are all learners all of the time and, critically, a further recognition that no one has any more right to be heard and to be listened to than anyone else. Whether implicitly or explicitly, the Scottish mythologies of egalitarianism and enlightenment were captured in the seemingly simple concept of the ‘unconference’, a neologism that some have taken a dislike to, but one that will stick nonetheless because it works.

So, through the good works of those on Islay and elsewhere who established a vibrant virtual community around a wide-ranging conversation about what education might, or should, look like in 2020, a highly disparate group of approximately 50 people descended on the island last week to meet and continue the virtual conversation face-to-face for one brief day. Amongst that group were, of course, teachers from primary, secondary, further and higher education, teachers from the widest range of ages and experiences imaginable, from student-teachers and probationary teachers to one or two who had already retired, some current and past headteachers, people from the national agencies in Scotland, such as LTS and SQA, a member of HMIE (who, incidentally, understood perfectly the nature of the event), people from various management and administrative levels in Scottish local government, one or two from the private sector, some who worked in or alongside education but were not themselves teachers, and one or two who were simply interested in joining the discussion. All were made very welcome.

The key to the event on Islay was that is was just one very short, though highly enjoyable and much-anticipated, episode within a broad and varied conversation that has been going on for some time in the virtual space and which will continue long after the pleasures of Islay fade from the minds of those who attended in person. It is a conversation that has involved many more people than those who were able to make their way to Islay, some of whom, indeed, held a parallel online event via FlashMeeting, and it is a conversation that will continue to expand in the coming weeks and months by any and every means at our disposal. The opportunity to insert a physical component into the virtual conversation was an important one to take, and the success of the event on the day certainly justified that desire.

For me, however, the most interesting aspect of the event was found in the attitudes and behaviours of a very small number of attendees at the event. These were people who, evidently, see themselves as senior players in the education system, either in local government or in school management, and who therefore proceeded to bless the room with their words of wisdom on any and every topic that arose. These were people who, for whatever reason, were quite unable to recognise and acknowledge through their own attitudes and behaviours the complete irrelevance of their formal status to the event. Even their body language spoke volumes: while everyone else sat in the body of the hall around the tables provided, this group, for the most part, stood apart at the back of the room. Their apparent unwillingness to join the throng, consciously or unconsciously, came across as a demonstration of detached superiority. It is, unfortunately, a common sight in education worldwide to see, in full flow, those who feel the need to impress not just their views on everyone else, but the unquestionable authority and rightness of those views. Most of the time, it is entirely misplaced.

It was enlightening, for instance - and, frankly, rather amusing - to be lectured on the primacy of face-to-face contact in education by people who have no active online presence whatsoever, and to be told that being ’stuck in front of a screen’ is no substitute for ‘real’ education (no definition proffered, of course). Watching the antics of those who suffer from the delusion that their formal status somehow confers authority on them was a salutory experience in a setting designed precisely to eschew such nonsense. In that particular setting, amongst that large group of people whose very presence at the event was the outcome of a long, complex and always-stimulating series of online interactions (through the Edu2020 wiki, through Twitter, through blogs, through online meetings, and through a whole host of means that these f2f-zealots simply neither know nor have any inclination to investigate) it did strike a slightly jarring note.

The positive effect, of course, was that this attitude of status-conferred authority, and the gushing and voluminous platitudes that we had to listen to as a result, established the perfect foil for all those in the room who understood precisely the nature and purpose of the event, who were aware that the event itself was just a small but significant part of a very much wider discussion, and who, because of their willingness to engage positively with the virtual, were therefore able to recognise clearly the singular lack of authority of these people in this context.

Technorati Tags: edu2020, education2020, islay, authority, status, teachmeet

Category: Web 2.0, authority, community, education, elitism, leadership, learning, social networking, social technology, teaching, technology

Technology Toolkit: Intro to Web 2.0

Posted on | June 11, 2009 | 5 Comments

I met John Pearce when I was out in Australia a few weeks ago - we were introduced by Jenny Luca. John is an education consultant based in Victoria, Australia, with a background in primary education and we were able to share a conversation or two in the couple of days of the Digital Fair held at Geelong Grammar School.

I took the chance while there to purchase a copy of John’s book Technology Toolkit: Introducing you to Web 2.0. This is a great introduction to all the basic concepts of Web 2.0 and is aimed primarily at offering teachers a rounded knowledge in this exciting area. John (and his co-author, Gary Bass) cover familiar ground - RSS, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, Social Bookmarking, Repositories and a range of web apps - and they offer some sound advice on classroom projects using most of the main concepts. It is a very practical book, laid out clearly and in easily digestible form and it comes with a CD-Rom offering a series of ideas, tasks and suggestions that mirror the structure of the book itself.

The ony problem is that this book is not available from Amazon (nor ABE Books - too new for that). Nor, strangely, is it available from the publisher (Nelson Cengage) unless you have an account with them and are based in Australia or New Zealand - like the newspaper industry, large swathes of the book publishing industry have a way to go before they begin to grasp the nature of this whole ‘Web thing’). So, unless a UK-based publisher picks it up - and I do believe there would be a market for this book in the UK, and in the USA - the only option is to order it directly from John via his blog - My Other Blog.

Anyone looking for a strong, well-written and clearly structured introduction to Web 2.0 for teachers would find this a useful purchase.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, john pearce, gary bass, teaching

Category: Web 2.0, books, education, internet, social technology, teaching, technology

’80s Whimsy: a framework for learning

Posted on | June 11, 2009 | No Comments

I recently came across a short discussion paper that I produced not long after I was appointed to my first primary headship in 1985. Its dot-matrix print (produced on an Amstrad PCW - yep, the first computer I owned came courtesy of ’sralan’) took me back to a time that is an aeon away from the bureaucratic clutter that confines teachers and headteachers today. The closest we came to any semblance of a nationally-driven curriculum was to be found in the occasional discussion paper or report that emanated from one of the various national committees that operated as adjuncts to the Scottish Consultative Committee on the Curriculum (SCCC).

The most important of these in that particular period for primary education came from the Committee on Primary Education. By the prescriptive standards of today, COPE’s Primary Education in the Eighties, published in 1983 might be seen as almost whimsical in its spirit and in its distinct lack of any attempt to orchestrate. Instead, it offered the consensual musings of a large group of educationists from across the country, and focused mainly on describing the ideal content of the primary curriculum. It offered little on the aims of education, much to the chagrin of some academics at the time, such as Andrew Brennan of Stirling University in a paper he wrote a couple of years after its publication:

…when it does mention aims, these are so vague as to be thoroughly unhelpful to our assessment of its recommendations.

So, while many criticized the need for continual reinvention of the wheel by schools, the fact that schools had to interpret policy for themselves at least helped teachers and headteachers to avoid the numbing straitjacket of detailed national guidelines. It was in this context that I produced my paper for discussion with teaching staff and for reference by the education authority.

In the absence of clear direction from the main policy papers, I therefore took it upon myself to decide that the purpose of the school was to enable children:

to develop forceful, enquiring minds, the capacity to question rationally, and the ability and confidence to take a reasoned stance;
to leave primary school with the knowledge and skills relevant to adult life in a fast-developing world;
to acquire an understanding and respect for religious, moral and material values and a tolerance of the beliefs and lifestyles of others;
to acquire an understanding of the economic, social and political order as well as of the interdependence or persons and peoples, individuals and nations;
to appreciate the whole spectrum of human achievements and the aspirations which contributed to them;
to come to respect themselves as independent and self-motivated members of society.

Looking back at these, I find them still reasonable, although today I might take the ‘the’ out of the second aim above to render it appropriate to primary, as opposed to secondary, education. I titled the section that included the list above the ‘framework for learning’ and I went on to describe what I called the ‘fabric of learning’ - I must have had a structure/superstructure model in mind at the time:

the development of language through active use
learning by cooperation with others
independent learning
access skills
learning to learn
problem solving
the nature of knowledge
social skills
the school ethos.

The point is, I guess, that those labouring in our schools have, over the past couple of decades or so, had the freedom to interpret policy taken away from them, bit by bit, to the point where many teachers across the country are anxious about the possibility that the Curriculum for Excellence might just start to give some of that freedom, some of that professionalism, back to teachers by offering scope once again for interpretation. Of course, the best teachers have always used their professionalism and expertise and experience in the classroom to interpret policy for the benefit of the learners in their charge - these are the teachers who are embracing the spirit of ACfE today and who welcome the possibilities to renew the joy to be had from some autonomy in their teaching.

Technorati Tags: sccc, cope, scottish education, primary education, curriculum for excellence