John Connell: The Blog

There are strate­gies that teach­ers and schools can employ to ensure that tech­nol­ogy becomes pur­pose­ful and sys­tem­atic. There can be lit­tle doubt that its poten­tial is very great, as it pro­vides the oppor­tu­nity for effec­tive teach­ing of skills, of find­ing and using infor­ma­tion within a con­text of high stu­dent inter­est. This unique com­bi­na­tion is too great a value to be wasted.

Celes­tine Kemu­nto Nya­mari lives in Kenya, where she attends St. Theresa’s Girls’ Sec­ondary School in Kithimu, a cou­ple of hours drive North-East of Nairobi. Celes­tine took part in the first student-led Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward debate (in Novem­ber last year) as a guest debater and is set to join EFF6: From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Lead­ers on Jan­u­ary 28, 2013.

The knowl­edge nec­es­sary to func­tion suc­cess­fully and fol­low a career was seen to already exist: it could be handed down from experts and lead­ers to learn­ers and work­ers. In the Indus­trial Age, cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment was a mat­ter of select­ing the most impor­tant knowl­edge to trans­mit to stu­dents; experts decided what knowl­edge to mass-prescribe and in which sequence.

Jane Gilbert and Rachel Bol­stad (amongst many oth­ers) ques­tioned the tra­di­tional con­cept of cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment in their 2008 book Dis­ci­plin­ing and draft­ing, or 21^st cen­tury learn­ing? Rethink­ing the New Zealand senior sec­ondary cur­ricu­lum for the future. Their words are quoted in a new White Paper, spon­sored by Promethean’s Jim Wynn, and authored by Gavin Dykes, Michael Fur­dyk, Sara Has­san and Jen­nifer Cor­riero for Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward, enti­tled From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Lead­ers (down­load­able PDF).

The authors agree with Gilbert and Bol­stad and state their posi­tion clearly:

…this model of cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment is dif­fi­cult to main­tain given that: it is no longer pos­si­ble to accu­rately pre­dict the type of knowl­edge youth may need as they move through life, the rapid pace at which tech­nol­ogy is chang­ing and new knowl­edge is devel­op­ing, the rate at which career pos­si­bil­i­ties are pro­lif­er­at­ing (ones with which we are famil­iar and ones we have yet to imag­ine), and social, eco­nomic and envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges are becom­ing increas­ingly complex.

They ask the question:

How can learner voice help address these uncertainties?

And the seem­ingly sim­ple answer?

By giv­ing learn­ers an authen­tic say in what and how they want to learn.

The White Paper will under­pin dis­cus­sion at the next Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward debate, to take place as part of Edu­ca­tion World Forum in Lon­don at the end of this month. The paper, which will be pre­sented by Sara Has­san, of Tak­ing IT Global, join­ing the debate from Toronto, is an excel­lent sum­mary of the issues sur­round­ing this crit­i­cal ques­tion, and the authors have been able to offer a com­bi­na­tion of sound think­ing, prac­ti­cal advice and a way for­ward for those in edu­ca­tion (still too few, I would say) who believe that cur­ricu­lum design, ped­a­gogy, the role of tech­nol­ogy and national edu­ca­tion policy-making all should be influ­enced and shaped by the voice of the learner.

The event will com­bine a live pres­ence at EWF and a global pres­ence via the magic of Telep­res­ence, An artic­u­late group of young edu­ca­tion lead­ers will debate the issues around ‘From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Leaders’.

The pri­mary aim is twofold:

And it will all take place across a truly inter­na­tional matrix of con­nec­tions, cross­ing coun­tries, cul­tures, and communities.

The event itself takes place on Mon­day 28^th Jan­u­ary at 11am and you will find the link to the live video broad­cast on the day itself on the Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward page on Promethean Planet. Promethean’s Chief Edu­ca­tion Offi­cer, Jim Wynn, will be open­ing the EFF6 debate, which will once again be mod­er­ated by inde­pen­dent edu­ca­tion con­sul­tant Gavin Dykes. Dis­cus­sion will be led by Sara Has­san and three stu­dent pre­sen­ters. Clos­ing the debate will be Michelle Selinger, Direc­tor of Edu­ca­tion at Cisco.

Twit­ter users can fol­low the debate itself using the hash­tag #eff6, while there will be some inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion around many of the key issues in the debate using the hash­tag #learn­ing­mat­ters.

Finally, a reminder that you can down­load the White Paper.

Almost every­one involved in edu­ca­tion agrees that lead­er­ship is important.

That, how­ever, is where agree­ment ends and debate begins. Beyond that point, we cross a tur­bu­lent land­scape where com­pet­ing def­i­n­i­tions of lead­er­ship abound, where the very nature of lead­er­ship is the stuff of argu­ment, where con­flict­ing philoso­phies of edu­ca­tion each gen­er­ate their own under­stand­ing of what makes for an effec­tive leader and how a good leader should behave, and where notions of how we must go about edu­cat­ing and train­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of edu­ca­tion lead­ers scat­ter in every direc­tion at once.

But such obser­va­tions are not a coun­sel of despair. Far from it! Just as edu­ca­tion itself can never be a sci­ence in any accepted sense – it is a sphere in which bat­tles will always be fought between philoso­phies, beliefs, ide­olo­gies, cul­tures, prej­u­dices and his­to­ries – so these same bat­tles are reflected in the ever-restless and excit­ing debates and dis­cus­sions around lead­er­ship in education.

What­ever our own stand­point might be, we should accept that one voice is often miss­ing from this unruly dis­course: that of young peo­ple, the very group most often affected by the deci­sions of edu­ca­tion lead­ers. Just as they are absent from edu­ca­tional debates gen­er­ally, so youth­ful voices are too often muted when the topic is the lead­er­ship of the social good that is utterly cen­tral to their futures: their edu­ca­tion.

Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward (EFF), an orga­ni­za­tion, spon­sored jointly by Promethean and Cisco, that brings together lead­ing global experts and change agents from the world of edu­ca­tion to dis­cuss ‘the top­ics that mat­ter most’, wants to begin to change that by bring­ing together some artic­u­late and intel­li­gent voices from the world’s youth to dis­cuss issues that are rel­e­vant to young peo­ple them­selves and to their edu­ca­tion.

In July 2012, in the most recent of the five debates orga­nized by EFF to date, a group of elo­quent and youth­ful voices debated the topic ‘From Learner Voice to Global Peace’. The young peo­ple were located all across the globe and came together pri­mar­ily through the won­der of Telep­res­ence (TP), a high-definition video con­fer­enc­ing tech­nol­ogy. The dis­cus­sion that day was not only intel­li­gent and thought­ful: it was truly inspir­ing for every­one involved.

The full debate can be watched and lis­tened to on Promethean Planet.

And now, in Jan­u­ary 2013, dur­ing the annual Edu­ca­tion World Forum, to be held in Lon­don, another group of excep­tional young peo­ple (includ­ing some of the voiced from EFF5) will come together through the magic of TP to talk about ‘From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Lead­ers’. Those of us involved in EFF have some hopes and expec­ta­tions of what might come out of the event, but we are also highly aware that there must be a gen­uine space in amongst our pre­sump­tions for the hopes and expec­ta­tions of the young peo­ple them­selves to come to the fore dur­ing and beyond the dis­cus­sion.

The pri­mary aim is twofold:

Issues such as the struc­ture of the cur­ricu­lum, how edu­ca­tion is deliv­ered (includ­ing dif­fer­ences in this across the world), the rel­e­vance of edu­ca­tion to their lives, how we might encour­age real change in the rela­tion­ships between peo­ple in edu­ca­tion sys­tems, seek­ing to realise the extra­or­di­nary value that can be sought by tack­ling education’s chal­lenges with peo­ple rather than doing it to them. We need all pol­icy mak­ers to take on board the knowl­edge that they are mak­ing deci­sions now that will affect the gen­er­a­tion ahead, and per­haps more than one gen­er­a­tion ahead.

And all of this will be hap­pen­ing across a truly inter­na­tional matrix of con­nec­tions, cross­ing coun­tries, cul­tures, and com­mu­ni­ties. I will be blog­ging again in the New Year with details of the date and time, and with infor­ma­tion about the key speak­ers, young and not-so-young, who will be lead­ing the discussion.

Watch out for that!

A let­ter in today’s Observer about George Osborne’s finan­cial com­pe­tence caught my eye — the let­ter was in response to an arti­cle by Will Hut­ton in which he had assumed that Osborne really is seek­ing to rem­edy finan­cial inequal­ity in the coun­try but he just doesn’t have the eco­nomic com­pe­tence to make it hap­pen. The sen­ti­ment in the let­ter res­onated with my own thoughts, not just about Osborne, but about the whole Tory endeav­our in Gov­ern­ment at the moment, and espe­cially about Michael Gove’s assault on school­ing in Eng­land. Of Osborne, Gra­ham Aspinall, of Sheffield, wrote:

To credit Osborne merely with eco­nomic illit­er­acy, as Hut­ton and Blanch­flower et al do, is too char­i­ta­ble. He is a shrewd ide­o­logue and strate­gist. It’s not that he doesn’t under­stand the ruin he is inflict­ing on fam­i­lies. He knows what he’s doing; he just doesn’t care. Osborne is not an eco­nomic illit­er­ate; he’s worse – a moral illiterate.

Polly Toyn­bee has called the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion:

…the most rightwing of all post­war governments…

I agree. And deep at the heart of this rightwing gov­ern­ment is a clever, seemingly-complex (but really not), unfail­ingly polite, well-read and media-savvy ide­o­logue who just hap­pens to be in charge of edu­ca­tion, appar­ently by his own choice. At least in Scot­land we have only to con­tend with an ego­tis­ti­cal incom­pe­tent as edu­ca­tion sec­re­tary; Eng­lish state school­ing, on the other hand, is now being sys­tem­at­i­cally under­mined and dis­man­tled by a man who thinks that his own life tale, that of some­one from hum­ble begin­nings made good by a rig­or­ous school­ing of a trad­tional kind, is the model that must serve everyone.

But that is only part of what Gove is about. Gove, like many of his rightwing friends in this Gov­ern­ment and beyond, accept whole­heart­edly the con­cept of an edu­ca­tion sys­tem as a race to the line, as the means by which the country’s elite is selected and trained, and as a sys­tem designed to weed out those who are not capa­ble (defined by cri­te­ria designed to serve the rightwing credo) of ben­e­fit­ing from any kind of aca­d­e­mic school­ing. Many will throw, and have thrown, the epi­thet of elit­ist at this crew, and will intend it as cen­sure. To Gove and his col­leagues, such name-callers are merely stat­ing the obvi­ous. They would call them­selves exactly the same, being merely descrip­tive of their phi­los­o­phy and inten­tions and values.

Michael Gove is a man with a mis­sion, and he is in a hurry to com­plete it. State school­ing in Eng­land has been, for many years now, a for­eign land when viewed over the fence from Scot­tish edu­ca­tion; soon, it will be more like view­ing the sur­face of Sat­urn, an exotic place beyond our easy ken and under­stand­ing, a sit­u­a­tion not lack­ing in irony given that Gove’s own school­ing hap­pened in Scotland.

Tak­ing break­fast with friends in San Jose, Costa Rica, sounds like a nice way to start the day. But unfor­tu­nately I will not be able to take up my invi­ta­tion to the Com­mem­o­ra­tive Break­fast being held for the 25^th anniver­sary of the Omar Dengo Foun­da­tion on Fri­day of this week, 20^th July. It would be nice to meet up once again with friends such as Clothilde Fon­seca and Eduardo Monge, as well as the cur­rent Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of this great orga­ni­za­tion, Leda Munõz.

I first vis­ited the Omar Dengo Foun­da­tion back in 2007 and was struck imme­di­ately by the deter­mi­na­tion of every­one in the orga­ni­za­tion to work for a bet­ter soci­ety through the potent com­bi­na­tion of dig­i­tal and net­work­ing tech­nolo­gies with a pro­gres­sive phi­los­o­phy of edu­ca­tion. I have been back a num­ber of times since and I always come way greatly impressed by their work.

I hope the break­fast goes well, and I know that the Foun­da­tion will go from strength to strength, and will surely still be work­ing on behalf of learn­ers and teach­ers in Cen­tral Amer­ica and beyond 25 years from now!

Rocked in the cra­dle of power from birth so that its rhythms become sec­ond nature, these peo­ple imbibe their sense of enti­tle­ment with their mother’s milk. But the per­sonal tutors, pri­vate schools, the most expen­sive uni­ver­si­ties do not, some­how, suf­fice. As though the ben­e­fits of wealth were not enough, they appar­ently feel the need to game the very sys­tem they already control.

Gary Younge, in The Guardian, bril­liantly giv­ing the lie to any thought that we live in a meritocracy.

For in the inter­ven­ing period I’ve come to realise that Twit­ter is actu­ally a unique learn­ing resource. By dis­cov­er­ing oth­ers through­out the World who share a pas­sion for edu­ca­tion, track­ing their thoughts, fol­low­ing their links, and engag­ing in pro­duc­tive con­ver­sa­tions – I have been inspired, chal­lenged and pro­fes­sion­ally invigorated.

Don Led­ing­ham on his Dam­a­scene con­ver­sion

Like many peo­ple who respect Don’s think­ing on edu­ca­tion and who have fol­lowed his Learn­ing Log since he set it up back in 2005 (beat­ing me into blog­ging by 5 months), I was sur­prised and dis­mayed when, in the mid­dle of 2010, he decided to call a tem­po­rary halt to his blog­ging — exactly one year later, he picked up the reins again. His remarks about that period of blog­ging absti­nence are very inter­est­ing indeed:

So what did I find out from my year out? Firstly, I missed the oppor­tu­nity to reflect upon my work and to be able to try to make sense of my world and to be able to share and check that mean­ing out with oth­ers. Sec­ondly, and per­haps more impor­tantly I missed the oppor­tu­nity to learn from others.

On reflec­tion my year out was a year with­out learn­ing. I did my job, I solved prob­lems, I led the ser­vice, but I’d go so far as to say that I didn’t learn – and with­out learn­ing we are not professionals.

Don is noth­ing if not scrupu­lously hon­est with him­self — a trait that is of course reflected in his work and in his deal­ings with every­one he meets — and his point here is one that many teach­ers and other edu­ca­tion pro­fes­sion­als would do well to ponder.

Tech­no­rati Tags: don led­ing­ham, twit­ter, blog­ging, lead­er­ship, edu­ca­tion

.…the fact is Google is an adver­tis­ing com­pany. This is where 96% of its rev­enue came from in 2010. It’s not a com­puter ser­vices com­pany, so the resources it devotes to serv­ing gov­ern­ments and school dis­tricts are small and the errors Google will con­tinue to make will be huge.…

Does the Los Ange­les expe­ri­ence with Google Apps offer any lessons for those pro­mot­ing the same as a replace­ment for Glow?

Tech­no­rati Tags: glow, google apps, los ange­les, con­sumer watchdog

The Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward debate — on Rel­e­vance in Edu­ca­tion — occurs in just three days time, on Mon­day 26^th Sep­tem­ber, start­ing at 2pm UK time (GMT+1). The debate takes place across Cisco’s global Telep­res­ence net­work, bring­ing peo­ple together from around 14 coun­tries, and will be acces­si­ble through a live video stream; and a twit­ter feed (using hash­tag #effde­bate).

The guest pre­sen­ter on Mon­day will be Trudi van Wyk, Edu­ca­tion Spe­cial­ist in eLearn­ing with the Com­mon­wealth of Learn­ing (COL). She will pick up on the two key out­comes from Debates 1 and 2:

• tra­di­tional school­ing is no longer relevant
• school­ing sys­tems are dif­fi­cult and slow to change

Within this con­text, Trudi will ask:

• How can we make learn­ing relevant?
• Do we try to turn edu­ca­tion sys­tems around (mak­ing school­ing rel­e­vant) or do we go out­side the school­ing sys­tem and focus on inno­v­a­tive projects and ini­tia­tives for small groups of learners?

She will focus on edu­ca­tion in the devel­op­ing world, par­tic­u­larly on the role of the teacher, and she will speak about two ini­tia­tives of the Com­mon­wealth of Learn­ing – the Com­mon­wealth Cer­tifi­cate for Teach­ers’ ICT Inte­gra­tion (CCTI) and Open Edu­ca­tional Resources (OER).

So, Mon­day 2pm UK time — make it a date!

Tech­no­rati Tags: edu­ca­tion fast for­ward, edu­ca­tion, rel­e­vance, trudi van wyk

Education’s pro­duc­tiv­ity is impor­tant at many lev­els. At one level it is about the real­iza­tion of indi­vid­ual poten­tial and per­sonal suc­cess and achiev­ing that in an appro­pri­ate length of time. At another level, when gov­ern­ments are reflect­ing on the dis­tri­b­u­tion of “tax dol­lars” and are faced with chal­leng­ing deci­sions on what to fund in health, wel­fare, secu­rity and eco­nomic devel­op­ment then invest­ment in edu­ca­tion quite rightly must stand up to close scrutiny. At a third level pro­duc­tiv­ity in edu­ca­tion may be related to gov­ern­ments achiev­ing a peace­ful and cohe­sive social struc­ture. This is not to sug­gest that edu­ca­tion should teach com­pli­ance, but that it should assist cit­i­zens in learn­ing how to social­ize, empathize, influ­ence and communicate.

The costs of get­ting pro­duc­tiv­ity wrong are not sim­ply mon­e­tary, but are the human costs of soci­etal dis­en­gage­ment and its con­se­quences. Such costs may ulti­mately affect other areas of gov­ern­ment spend­ing, but may be per­ceived as sep­a­rate from education.

The most recent Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward debate, in April, was on the crit­i­cal topic of pro­duc­tiv­ity in edu­ca­tion. Our two guest speak­ers, Jean John­ston, of NotSchool, and Richard deLorenzo, have teamed up with my good friend (and fel­low EFF Fel­low), Gavin Dykes, to pro­duce a short paper as a follow-up to the debate, and an early draft of this can be down­loaded here in PDF for­mat.

The final ver­sion of the paper will be made avail­able on the EFF site, but please feel free to com­ment on this ini­tial draft here on my blog. I will make sure all com­ments are passed to the authors.

The next debate, on mak­ing learn­ing rel­e­vant will take place on Mon­day 26^th Sep­tem­ber, and the Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward site gives details on how to access the debate across a range of plat­forms.

Tech­no­rati Tags: edu­ca­tion fast for­ward, pro­duc­tiv­ity, rel­e­vance, edu­ca­tion, learn­ing