John Connell: The Blog

A nice com­ment on my blog led me to the blog of Uyea­sound Pri­mary School in Shet­land — with the delight­ful title of ‘the Rain­bow Light School’. Any­one who has ever vis­ited Shet­land will know why this title might be used. The blog is in a friendly, con­ver­sa­tional style that will pull me back to read it regularly.

The com­ment on my own blog came from a mys­te­ri­ous ‘HT’ — could that be the school’s head­teacher (Sher­lock Holmes, I am not!) who, accord­ing to my research is Kate Coutts?

So, take a look at the Rain­bow Light School!

Tech­no­rati Tags: Uyea­sound , shet­land

I have been min­ing the rich seam of ideas pre­sented by Cana­dian edu­ca­tion­ist and learn­ing envi­ron­ment designer, Brian Alger, on his web­site, the Expe­ri­ence Designer Net­work. Brian has pub­lished a book — The Expe­ri­ence Designer: Learn­ing, Net­works and the Cyber­sphere — which I have not read yet. His site is, I would guess, based largely on the notions he expresses in his book.

There is much of inter­est here for any­one think­ing about the ‘new edu­ca­tion nar­ra­tive’. Alger has his own idio­syn­cratic take on the issues involved, but he has some thought-provoking things to say. I was par­tic­u­larly taken with his attempt to describe the impact of mov­ing from a tra­di­tional edu­ca­tion sys­tem to one that he describes as a Con­nected Intel­li­gence Learn­ing Envi­ron­ment. Like me, you might not agree with the pre­cise word­ing he uses for each ele­ment below, but his over­all direc­tion is hard to argue with.

Alger writes on Con­nected Inteligence: Impact:

Con­nected Intel­li­gence Learn­ing Envi­ron­ments are designed to shift many of the tra­di­tional assump­tions about edu­ca­tion, teach­ing, instruc­tion and assess­ment into a new par­a­digm of learn­ing. The essen­tial shifts are…

Prod­ucts
From: Infor­ma­tion, facts, data
To: Behav­ior, pro­to­types, experience

Tech­no­rati Tags: brian alger, expe­ri­ence design, con­nected intelligence

The cur­rent debate in Eng­land about British­ness is, of course, mak­ing the expected incur­sion into edu­ca­tion. What­ever the mer­its and demer­its of the debate, I think the whole idea will sim­ply prove too dif­fi­cult to realise in any gen­uinely prag­matic fash­ion in terms of the schools’ syl­labus in England.

Why should this be the case? For three rea­sons, I believe:

First, because, like the British state itself, the British ‘nation’ has from the begin­ning been a part­ner­ship of con­ve­nience rather than a gen­uine expres­sion of nation­al­ism or nation­al­ity. The union of the par­lia­ments was itself largely an act of eco­nomic con­ve­nience — cer­tainly few would deny the social and eco­nomic ben­e­fits that it has wrought over the three cen­turies since for its con­stituent parts. As such, the con­cept of British­ness is sim­ply too woolly and neb­u­lous to be dis­tilled in any mean­ing­ful way within a mod­ern cur­ricu­lum — any attempt, for exam­ple, to pass off rote mem­o­riza­tion of a chronol­ogy of British kings and queens as an expres­sion of British iden­tity would be just too point­less for words.

Sec­ondly, I have long agreed with the notion that it is really only the Scots, Welsh and North­ern Irish that have, over the years, had any real chance of under­stand­ing the notion of British­ness. The rea­son for this is sim­ply that for each of the Celtic coun­tries it has been pos­si­ble to sep­a­rate in some way their more imme­di­ate nation­al­ity from their mem­ber­ship of the larger, British entity. So, for instance, as a Scot, I have tended to see myself as Scots first and British sec­ond; the same has largely been true for the Welsh and Irish, I believe. The Eng­lish, how­ever, have tended to equate Eng­lish­ness with British­ness — I think they have found it much harder to dif­fer­en­ti­ate one from the other. I doubt that it would be too dif­fi­cult to adum­brate at least some of the social, cul­tural and his­tor­i­cal roots for this cor­re­spon­dence in Eng­lish minds. This is by no means a crit­i­cism of the Eng­lish — whether we like it or not, Eng­land has been the ‘senior part­ner’, so to speak, in this fed­er­a­tion of nations, and that must affect mind­sets.

Thirdly, at a time when there is a strong trend towards a global econ­omy and a global soci­ety, the ten­sion with attempts to pro­tect and sus­tain regional or national iden­ti­ties is inevitably going to be fraught with dif­fi­culty. I am quite happy to be a Scot, but I’d like to be a Scot that has no prob­lem iden­ti­fy­ing myself as a Euro­pean, or indeed, as a mem­ber of a global soci­ety in which my imme­di­ate inter­ests and pas­sions can be aligned closely with those of my peers around the world.

Per­haps some lessons in ‘inter­na­tion­al­ity’ would be more appro­r­i­ate today?

Tech­no­rati Tags: british­ness, nation­al­ity, scots, eng­lish, irish, welsh, inter­na­tion­al­ism, internationality

Isn’t THIS just brilliant?

Thanks to Doug John­son for point­ing to it!

Tech­no­rati Tags: blueskunk, doug john­son, visual lit­er­acy, visu­al­iza­tion, periodictable

I have been glanc­ing occa­sion­ally at some of the arti­cles and essays in Samuel Brit­tan’s book ‘Against the Flow’ over recent weeks. It is a col­lec­tion of pieces writ­ten mostly between 1999 and 2005 for var­i­ous pub­li­ca­tions. I bought the book just before Christ­mas and have enjoyed dip­ping into it, each time read­ing all or most of a piece and then leav­ing it alone for a cou­ple of days before going back to it. Brit­tan is a curi­ous char­ac­ter — vir­u­lently anti-socialism (note the ‘ism’ rather than ‘ist’ — it is the credo he dis­likes, not nec­es­sar­ily its adher­ents — oth­er­wise I might have found him harder to read), tren­chantly icon­o­clas­tic, and exco­ri­at­ingly log­i­cal (by his own logic, of course — but that is merely to state the obvious).

His unsen­ti­men­tal method brings him up against myr­iad writ­ers and thinkers, politi­cians and hacks — he ranges through British for­eign pol­icy to the Euro­pean econ­omy to pub­lic ser­vices to gov­ern­ment eco­nomic pol­icy to reli­gion and ethics to acad­eme to some key twen­ti­eth cen­tury lumi­nar­ies, such as Keynes, Hayek and Bertrand Rus­sell, and much more. Even when I dis­agree with him, which is quite often, I can­not but respect the means by which he comes to his con­clu­sions. I would cer­tainly not like to meet him in a head-to-head debate — on any sub­ject!

One sen­tence jumped out at me as I read one piece last night, on Steven Pinker’s book ‘The Blank Slate’, a book I own but have only read in bits. Brit­tan writes some­thing I have always agreed with on a purely instinc­tive level — what inter­ested me par­tic­u­larly, though, was the link he made to David Hume. He wrote, in a piece called Human­i­tar­i­an­ism With­out Illu­sions:

“Through­out …[Pinker’s]… book, he reminds peo­ple of the Scot­tish philoso­pher David Hume’s demon­stra­tion that no ‘ought’ propo­si­tion fol­lows from any fac­tual or log­i­cal assertion.”

I found an online copy of Hume’s A Trea­tise on Human Nature so that I could search the text, and came up with this — in Book III, Part 1, Sec­tion 1:

“In every sys­tem of moral­ity, which I have hith­erto met with, I have always remarked, that the author pro­ceeds for some time in the ordi­nary way of rea­son­ing, and estab­lishes the being of a God, or makes obser­va­tions con­cern­ing human affairs; when of a sud­den I am sur­prized to find, that instead of the usual cop­u­la­tions of propo­si­tions, is, and is not, I meet with no propo­si­tion that is not con­nected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imper­cep­ti­ble; but is, how­ever, of the last con­se­quence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new rela­tion or affir­ma­tion, it is nec­es­sary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a rea­son should be given, for what seems alto­gether incon­ceiv­able, how this new rela­tion can be a deduc­tion from oth­ers, which are entirely dif­fer­ent from it.”

That, I think, is why I can never be any­thing other than a rel­a­tivist when it comes to ethics, moral­ity or belief — I have never really been able to under­stand how any­one can sim­ply ‘know’ they are right in eth­i­cal or moral terms. That absolute knowl­edge that ‘I am right’ is a strange phe­nom­e­non, indeed.

And, boy, does this old world of ours suf­fer from its effects!

Tech­no­rati Tags: samuel brit­tan, steven pinker, david hume, rel­a­tivism, ethics, moral­ity, belief, reli­gion, ought, is

I caught an item on Simon Mayo’s BBC Radio 5 Live pro­gramme this after­noon in which Chris Val­lance plonked him­self some­where in Sec­ond Life and reported live about his expe­ri­ence there (Chris also has a BBC blog — pods&blogs). While Mayo spoke to a few peo­ple about the phe­nom­e­non of Sec­ond Life gen­er­ally, Chris, in the guise of ‘journo lumpen’ — his avatar — soon had a throng of Sec­ond Lif­ers around him chat­ting away. I went into Sec­ond Life and lurked on the edge of the group to see what was going on — it is an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence to see a group inter­act­ing in the vir­tual world while lis­ten­ing to some­one in the broad­cast media talk­ing live about the experience.

Mayo received the usual nois­esome bou­quet of emails and texts implor­ing the vir­tual explor­ers to ‘get a 1^st life!’ — all too pre­dictable and unin­formed, I guess. But Mayo, in his sig­na­ture style — intel­li­gent, light-touch, sym­pa­thetic, humor­ous — man­aged to fit quite a lot of inter­est­ing chat around the piece. He even man­aged to get the real life peo­ple behind a cou­ple of the avatars milling around ‘journo’ Val­lance to speak to him on the phone as they were inter­act­ing with the group.

Mayo chat­ted to Jim Pur­brick, a Not­ting­ham pro­gram­mer cur­rently work­ing for Lin­den Labs as a senior soft­ware engi­neer. Pur­brick gave us a suc­cinct and fac­tual descrip­tion of what Sec­ond Life is, how it looks to some­one in the world, its open-endedness, and the attrac­tive­ness of Sec­ond Life to so many com­pa­nies. One of the com­pa­nies that now has a pres­ence in Sec­ond Life is, of course, Cisco — they have built Cisco Island, with places for meet­ings, lec­tures, work­shops and so on. Pur­brick also men­tioned the fact that Lin­den are dip­ping their toes into the open source stream, open­ing up the source for the viewer appli­ca­tion that users have to down­load to their com­put­ers. They do have plans to extend their exper­i­ment with open source, though.

He also had a few words with Tim Guest who is pub­lish­ing a book soon called ‘Sec­ond Lives’ on the vir­tual world. Guest explained a lit­tle about the Sec­ond Life econ­omy and the nature of the var­i­ous inter­ac­tions that can hap­pen there. There was also some inter­est­ing chat about the pos­si­bil­ity of 1^st life pol­i­tics mak­ing its way onto the vir­tual stage — already Jean-Marie le Pen, the French far-right politi­cian has tried to set up an office in Sec­ond Life and has met with more than a lit­tle resis­tance to the move from other Sec­ond Lif­ers.

I guess now would be a good time to ‘come out’ as a res­i­dent of Sec­ond Life — my avatar’s name is Jonn Jya, and as you can see, I have made it easy for any­one I bump into there to recog­nise what part of the world I come from! To date, I have spent the odd moments I have been there sim­ply wan­der­ing this strange and diverse envi­ron­ment. I can see the pos­si­bil­i­ties of this alter­na­tive world, but Sec­ond Life, at the moment, still has a way to go to become the world it could be. That will come, though, I have no doubt.

It is undoubt­edly an intrigu­ing and engag­ing ‘place’ and most def­i­nitely points the way towards how such immer­sive envi­ron­ments could develop along mul­ti­far­i­ous routes over the next few years. One of the Mayo inter­vie­wees pointed out — in response to some­one who texted to say they sim­ply could not see the point of such open-ended worlds, as opposed, for instance, to online game envi­ron­ments with struc­ture and ‘rules’ — that sim­i­lar tech­nol­ogy is being used to cre­ate envi­ron­ments designed to help peo­ple suf­fer­ing from schiz­o­phre­nia or Aspergers.

I will con­tinue to explore Sec­ond Life and may occa­sion­ally present some thoughts here on its poten­tial, espe­cially for edu­ca­tion and train­ing. I don’t go into the envi­ron­ment very often but when I do you are likely, for obvi­ous rea­sons, to find me some­where on Cisco Island — unless I’m off else­where explor­ing! Find me and say hello if you’re ever in Sec­ond Life at the same time as me.

Tech­no­rati Tags: sec­ondlife, lin­den­labs, simon­mayo, bbc5live

I have been work­ing my way recently through Don Led­ing­ham’s “Seven Sides of Edu­ca­tion Lead­er­ship”. As with every­thing Don does, his model demon­strates an intel­li­gence and a cre­ativ­ity that should imme­di­ately ren­der it wor­thy of con­sid­er­a­tion, I believe, by any­one need­ing to think about the pecu­liar­i­ties of lead­er­ship in edu­ca­tion. Like Don, I usu­ally think in metaphors. For instance, almost every­thing I do in ICT –whether using an appli­ca­tion, search­ing, trou­bleshoot­ing, devel­op­ing — is based on a whole series of internally-held metaphors. Some of them are extremely vague and would not look too intel­li­gi­ble were I to try to write them down or pic­ture them. But they work for me, and that is the impor­tant thing.

Don’s metaphors are derived from his own take on the pecu­liar­i­ties of edu­ca­tion and the def­i­nite and dis­tinct require­ments for effec­tive lead­er­ship within this domain.

So, the impor­tant thing about Don’s model is that it is aimed squarely at lead­er­ship in the edu­ca­tional con­text, a con­text, by the way, that is not nec­es­sar­ily con­fined to the school. Too many lead­er­ship mod­els are generic, all-encompassing — many have much to com­mend them, but few make explicit the assump­tions behind the men­tal or cul­tural model that under­pins them or the spe­cific context(s) in which they were first envis­aged. For Don, there are enough dis­tinc­tive traits and idio­syn­crasies in edu­ca­tion that he feels the need to define a model for lead­er­ship that meets those spe­cific char­ac­ter­is­tics. I agree with him on that — I know from long expe­ri­ence that edu­ca­tion is dif­fer­ent enough to war­rant spe­cial treat­ment. The var­ied and, often, con­flict­ing sets of stake­hold­ers in edu­ca­tion (think, for exam­ple, of the desired ends that par­ents and their chil­dren seek from school­ing — they do not always coin­cide — whose needs should take prece­dence?) means that being a leader in edu­ca­tion can be dif­fi­cult and chal­leng­ing.

With his lead­er­ship metaphor — really, an extended metaphor com­pris­ing a num­ber of sub-metaphors — Don explic­itly seeks, there­fore, to estab­lish a par­tic­u­lar cul­tural model for behav­iours through­out edu­ca­tion. For Don, this would be a cul­ture that eschews the con­stric­tions of hier­ar­chy, that val­ues gen­uine par­tic­i­pa­tion at all lev­els, that seeks, per­haps, a dis­trib­u­tive model of decision-making (puts me in mind of Greg Whitby on Dis­trib­u­tive Lead­er­ship), that engen­ders com­mu­nity, that trusts peo­ple, and that pro­motes crit­i­cal think­ing through­out an organ­i­sa­tion. This, of course, is a vast sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of Don’s think­ing, but it draws a pic­ture of an edu­ca­tional organ­i­sa­tion at work that I could eas­ily envi­sion as one that is sym­pa­thetic, adapt­able, trans­for­ma­tional, humane and intel­li­gent — how many organ­i­sa­tions can claim all of these epi­thets for them­selves? And how many edu­ca­tional organisations?

The point is, I guess, that any of us could come up with our own set of metaphors for lead­er­ship, at any level and in any con­text, but I agree with Don that any par­tic­u­lar set of metaphors brings with it its own explicit or implicit cul­tural bag­gage. If you like the cul­tural mes­sage out­lined above, then take a long hard look at Don’s ‘Seven Sides’ model.

Tech­no­rati Tags: don led­ing­ham, lead­er­ship, 7sides, edu­ca­tion

Many peo­ple from so many dif­fer­ent parts of Scot­tish edu­ca­tion, and else­where, played crit­i­cal roles in the devel­op­ment of SSDN. In the days before it was known as Spark (briefly), the key peo­ple tended to be in the Scot­tish Exec­u­tive. The ini­tial idea for a national intranet came from that tri­umvi­rate that I have men­tioned before in New Edu­ca­tional Devel­op­ments (NED), part of the Scot­tish Exec­u­tive Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment — they were Eleanor Ember­son, Stu­art Robert­son and Neil Mac­Far­lane. Eleanor went on to become the head of the Scot­tish Courts Admin­is­tra­tion and is still there. Stu­art is now retired — but “retire­ment” is evi­dently not a word he recog­nises, because he is now back with LTS as a con­sul­tant help­ing to organ­ise this year’s Scot­tish Learn­ing Fes­ti­val! Only Neil is still in NED and is still a cen­tral mem­ber of the team work­ing to imple­ment Glow. It was Neil who penned a short 5-page paper in early 2001 that still stands as a rea­son­able descrip­tion of the huge learn­ing plat­form we are cur­rently imple­ment­ing — it is fit­ting there­fore that Neil is still there, see­ing his own orig­i­nal con­cep­tion through to completion.

I was pulled into NED in 2001 from West Loth­ian Coun­cil, and I imme­di­ately recruited some­one who was to prove absolutely cru­cial to shap­ing SSDN, Robert Skey. As I have said else­where, Robert’s “intel­li­gence and “left-field” think­ing” made my own job as project man­ager a thou­sand times eas­ier that it might oth­er­wise have been. Dur­ing those 18 months or so that we spent work­ing with our col­leagues across the coun­try to draw up the spec­i­fi­ca­tion for SSDN, we were joined by Isla Jack and David Rankin. Both had other areas of work at the time but both played key roles in the crit­i­cal process of con­sul­ta­tion and spec­i­fi­ca­tion. Later, Hilery Williams, now work­ing in East Loth­ian, con­tributed the vital mate­r­ial that was to form the part of the SSDN spec­i­fi­ca­tion designed to ensure max­i­mum acces­si­bil­ity for those with addi­tional needs.

Of course, right from the very begin­ning, a num­ber of peo­ple in LT Scot­land also played impor­tant parts in the process: Lau­rie O“Donnell, the late John Dickie, Jack David­son (still a key player in the Glow tech­ni­cal team), Patri­cia Kemp, Nick Mor­gan, Kennedy Fraser and Shirley Grant. Oth­ers, such as Emma Walsh, Ian Gra­ham, Mike Thomas and oth­ers have been great friends of SSDN since then.

At some point in those early days, the per­son who has prob­a­bly done more than any other indi­vid­ual to ensure SSDN’s suc­cess joined the team: Jim Buchan. Jim, at that time, was sec­onded from North­ern Col­lege to UKERNA, and had man­aged the roll-out of the Super­JANET 4 infra­struc­ture across Scot­land. Nom­i­nally, Jim’s role in SSDN was to man­age the imple­men­ta­tion of the Inter­con­nect — how­ever, his uniquely com­pre­hen­sive knowl­edge of the com­bined areas of edu­ca­tion, ICT and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions meant that his influ­ence became absolutely crit­i­cal from the start. Jim, of course, is still very much part of the Glow team, as its Chief Tech­ni­cal Offi­cer. Never make the mis­take, how­ever, of see­ing Jim sim­ply as a “techie” — he is an edu­ca­tion­ist at heart, but one with a mas­sive knowl­edge of what can be done tech­ni­cally to enhance the edu­ca­tional process. Scot­tish edu­ca­tion really needs to cher­ish this dia­mond in their midst!

There is another big group of peo­ple, too many to name indi­vid­u­ally, who all played vital roles in those early days — they belonged to that bril­liant bunch of ICT advis­ers, techies and oth­ers who came together so many times, in their own time, to work their way line by line through the grow­ing spec­i­fi­ca­tion for SSDN. They all know who they are, and I hope they realise that, with­out them, we sim­ply would not have been able to take the pro­gramme as far as we have.

The team that actu­ally car­ried out the pro­cure­ment and the con­tract nego­ti­a­tions deserve spe­cial men­tion, but I“ll leave that for another post, along with the extended RM team that has done so much to ensure gen­uine joint work­ing in SSDN.

I know that I will have missed some­one from the list above — if I have, please blame my advanc­ing years, but let me know and I will put it right!!

Tech­no­rati Tags: glow, ssdn

I have been sur­prised and delighted at the many nice things that peo­ple have said to me over the past few weeks since I indi­cated that I would be mov­ing on. I know I am leav­ing at a time when there is still work to be done, but that, of course, will always be the case. I know, how­ever, that I have left the task of com­plet­ing SSDN/Glow to a great bunch of peo­ple, some of whom have been involved with the pro­gramme in var­i­ous ways from the begin­ning, many who have come on board over the past cou­ple of years in par­tic­u­lar, and a few good peo­ple that have joined the effort in the very recent past. The joint LTS / RM team is just about as strong and healthy a part­ner­ship between the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors as I have seen anywhere!

Given the scale and the impor­tance of Glow, it is grat­i­fy­ing for me to see the high qual­ity of the team, there­fore, that will con­tinue the work. Glow is grad­u­ally becom­ing a fix­ture in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion, even before it actu­ally starts to roll out. That is impor­tant, because it means that the edu­ca­tion com­mu­nity in the coun­try is tak­ing own­er­ship of it, and that in turn means that teach­ers, schools, local author­i­ties and every­one else who has a stake in the project’s suc­cess will work to ensure that it deliv­ers the tools and ser­vices that they need. Com­pla­cency will sim­ply never be allowed to develop.

From the begin­ning, SSDN was never a top-down project — right from the start, it “belonged” to every­one in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion who was will­ing to con­tribute to the think­ing, the plan­ning, the dream­ing and the cre­ation of this inno­v­a­tive plat­form for teach­ing and learn­ing online. It was this uni­ver­sal own­er­ship of SSDN that ensured that it would never be a closed sys­tem in any way, that it would always be an open sys­tem, though a secure one. Glow is designed from the ground up to be exten­si­ble — the fact that it will be entirely web-based is crit­i­cal here. Also, Glow is a plat­form that will never, in any real sense, be com­pleted — it will always be under devel­op­ment. It really could not be oth­er­wise since the tech­no­log­i­cal and edu­ca­tional con­text in which it will thrive is itself under con­stant change — any learn­ing plat­form that tried to set itself in stone at any point would be doomed to fail­ure from its inception.

Indeed, it might be worth not­ing at this point that I have said to any­one will­ing to lis­ten for a num­ber of years now, that I do not believe that SSDN/Glow will really reach fruition until its sec­ond iter­a­tion, i.e. after the first con­tract is com­pleted in 2010. The com­plex­ity of the design and the vagaries of the envi­ron­ment in which it will exist are such that it is likely to be the sec­ond ver­sion of SSDN before teach­ers and oth­ers really start to see its full potential.

So, while I intend in my next post to thank a few key peo­ple who were around at the very begin­ning of SSDN or who played major roles in get­ting it to where it is now, there is no sense in which the project can ever be seen as the achieve­ment of a small group — it belongs to Scot­tish edu­ca­tion, and I believe that every­one in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion has a part to play to ensure its long term suc­cess for our schools.

Tech­no­rati Tags: ltscot­land, rm, glow, scot­tishe­d­u­ca­tion

A small adjust­ment to the look and feel of my blog to mark my own change of scene — thank you to Ewan for per­mis­sion to use his photo in my header graphic — note the dis­ap­pear­ing beer bottle!

The image is a view of the Cairn­gorm national park from my hotel win­dow in Aviemore dur­ing the win­ter of 2005–2006.

I also intro­duce my new blog to the wider world — I intend to keep some notes of my trav­els around the globe in my work for Cisco. I will start to make use of it within the next week or so.

Tech­no­rati Tags: soutra, edublog­ger, travel, cairn­gorm