University as Public Currency

January 6th, 2013 § 0 comments § permalink

A uni­ver­sity is not a sci­en­tific hot­house with some frills around the edges – such as the human­i­ties – gen­er­at­ing off-the-peg ideas for busi­ness to patent and com­mer­cialise. It is an inde­pen­dent, autonomous insti­tu­tion hous­ing mul­ti­ple aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­plines whose cross-fertilisations and serendip­i­ties lie at the heart of the capac­ity to enlarge the knowl­edge base. It is con­se­crated to deliv­er­ing knowl­edge as intel­lec­tu­ally held in com­mon – why the free­dom to research, to pub­lish and to dis­sem­i­nate is the sine qua non of aca­d­e­mic life. It is a pub­lic, open insti­tu­tion, so a pri­vate uni­ver­sity is a con­tra­dic­tion in terms. Knowl­edge, and the qual­i­fi­ca­tions that go with it, is nec­es­sar­ily pub­lic currency.

Will Hut­ton, in today’s Observer.

The knowl­edge econ­omy is mas­sively depen­dent on the intel­lec­tual pow­er­house of higher edu­ca­tion, and a crit­i­cal ingre­di­ent of that is its capac­ity to sus­tain high lev­els of post­grad­u­ate train­ing and devel­op­ment. That capac­ity is under threat at the present time from the con­comi­tant effects of the huge rise in under­grad­u­ate fees and the deci­sions by the research coun­cils in the UK to with­draw sup­port from taught mas­ters courses.

Just another exam­ple of the cur­rent UK Government’s will­ing­ness to allow ide­ol­ogy and self-interest to trump what is good for the coun­try in the long run. As in schools, so in higher edu­ca­tion too.

[This is a cross-posting from my new blog at I Am Learner]

Truly Public Spaces on the Web

December 20th, 2012 § 1 comment § permalink

Right now, all of the places we can assem­ble on the web in any kind of num­bers are pri­vately owned. And privately-owned pub­lic spaces aren’t real pub­lic spaces. They don’t allow for the play and the chaos and the cre­ativ­ity and bril­liance that only arise in spaces that don’t exist purely to gen­er­ate profit. And they’re sus­cep­ti­ble to being grad­u­ally gaslighted by the com­pa­nies that own them.

Anil Dash, on just one impor­tant issue amongst a num­ber, in a great piece on Rebuild­ing the Web we Lost.

Affirm­ing ‘the play and the chaos and the cre­ativ­ity and bril­liance’ of truly pub­lic spaces, namely spaces not intended purely for profit, is crit­i­cal to an open social web, and pre­cisely what the Face­books of the world can never engender.

Thanks to Stephen Downes for the link.

Education Fast Forward: from learner voice to emerging leaders

December 19th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink


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:

  • bring the voice of youth to the policy-makers’ table, to let the young peo­ple hear some views on the big issues, and to let them debate them openly and fully
  • to bring the policy-makers (kick­ing and scream­ing if nec­es­sary) to the learn­ers’ table so that they have to face up to the issues that are crit­i­cal to the learn­ers before they make their pol­icy decisions

    • 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!

    Gove’s Elitist Mission

    December 16th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

    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.

    Education: a continuation of politics by other means

    November 28th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

    Like war, for­mal edu­ca­tion is a con­tin­u­a­tion of pol­i­tics by other means — less direct, less con­trolled, less con­trol­lable, but no less pow­er­ful in its long term effects.

    I wrote the above on this blog three years ago in a post that lamented the sheer cack-handedness of most Gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence in edu­ca­tion (they call it policy-making) in Eng­land over the past 30 years. I should have empha­sised the uncon­trol­lable effects of this ‘policy-making’ much more than I did — a long suc­ces­sion of edu­ca­tion min­is­ters in West­min­ster over the past 3 decades have attempted to inflict their own vari­ants on social engi­neer­ing, and all of them have failed spec­tac­u­larly. Unfor­tu­nately, each inevitable fail­ure leaves a legacy of yet more dis­ar­ray behind it.

    Simon Jenk­ins, writ­ing in today’s Guardian, agrees:

    Account­abil­ity for England’s schools is now a total mess.

    Jenk­ins takes aim at the lat­est ridicu­lous ‘league table’ to be imposed on England’s schools by Michael Gove. As he writes:

    The crav­ing for uni­for­mity in pub­lic ser­vices has become a frenzy.…The belief that the crooked tim­ber of mankind can be beaten straight on a White­hall work­table is the great­est of all min­is­te­r­ial fallacies.

    It reminds me of Campbell’s Law, first stated by Don­ald T. Camp­bell, the psy­chol­o­gist who pio­neered the study of human creativity:

    The more any quan­ti­ta­tive social indi­ca­tor is used for social decision-making, the more sub­ject it will be to cor­rup­tion pres­sures and the more apt it will be to dis­tort and cor­rupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

    Michael Gove might well be push­ing for a par­tic­u­lar ver­sion of his­tory to be imposed on England’s schools, but he is obvi­ously less than keen to learn history’s lessons himself.

    SAIDE & OER Africa

    November 27th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

    This has been cross-posted from my new blog at iamlearner.net, which I have estab­lished to sup­port and com­ple­ment my busi­ness web­site at consult.iamlearner.net.

    On my trav­els around the world I have often found myself work­ing with some truly inspir­ing organ­i­sa­tions. One of these is SAIDE, the South African Insti­tute for Dis­tance Edu­ca­tion, who I met with more than one occa­sion in Johan­nes­burg. This is an orga­ni­za­tion that is truly com­mit­ted to trans­form­ing edu­ca­tion and train­ing through a focus on the adop­tion of open learn­ing prin­ci­ples and dis­tance edu­ca­tion methods.

    SAIDE do not think small! One of their key aims is to:

    Sup­port pro­grammes in sound and inno­v­a­tive course design, mate­ri­als devel­op­ment, learner sup­port, man­age­ment, and the use of tech­nol­ogy, par­tic­u­larly for large scale pro­vi­sion.

    They given pow­er­ful sub­stance to their prin­ci­ples with the launch of a site ded­i­cated to the pro­vi­sion of OER resources for edu­ca­tion across the con­ti­nent of Africa — OER Africa. With spe­cial areas of focus — teacher edu­ca­tion, health, agri­cul­ture and skills devel­op­ment — this is a great resource built on the assump­tions of openness.

    A quick search for ‘pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment’ threw up some 237 ref­er­ences, and I could see a rich har­vest of ideas and mate­ri­als even in the first two of three pages of results.

    Def­i­nitely worth a look!

    Kelvin Doe, aka DJ Focus — from Sierra Leone to MIT, self-taught

    November 27th, 2012 § 1 comment § permalink

    A per­fect illus­tra­tion of the I Am Learner philosophy!

    Has the UN’s Obsession with Primary Education Backfired?

    November 27th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

    This has been cross-posted from my new blog at iamlearner.net, which I have estab­lished to sup­port and com­ple­ment my busi­ness web­site at consult.iamlearner.net.

    In the light of my recent post, about the I Am Malala cam­paign, it was inter­est­ing to come across the intel­li­gent and thought­ful arti­cle in this month’s Prospect Mag­a­zine by Clare Lock­hart of the Insti­tute for State Effec­tive­ness. Clare believes that the UN’s obses­sion with pri­mary edu­ca­tion in its Mil­len­nium Devel­op­ment Goals has backfired.

    The UN’s MDGs were set more than a decade ago, and the one that is clos­est to being met is the one on uni­ver­sal pri­mary edu­ca­tion, with around 88% of school-age chil­dren across the devel­op­ing world in pri­mary school (in 2010, up from 81% in 1999). Clare’s arti­cle argues that the focus on pri­mary edu­ca­tion has had the unin­tended con­se­quence of skew­ing invest­ment away from sec­ondary edu­ca­tion and voca­tional train­ing, both vital instru­ments in achiev­ing the con­tin­u­ing and grow­ing needs of coun­tries for:

    .…their next gen­er­a­tion of doc­tors, nurses, engi­neers, accoun­tants, and project managers.…without sec­ondary and ter­tiary edu­ca­tion, a coun­try can­not run its health, agri­cul­ture and finan­cial systems.…

    And iron­i­cally, given the MDG’s right­ful focus on the crit­i­cal impor­tance of edu­ca­tion, this skew­ing effect has also led to:

    .…a short­fall of teach­ers to train the gen­er­a­tion beyond them. Even main­tain­ing pri­mary edu­ca­tion ser­vices, espe­cially in the coun­tries with grow­ing pop­u­la­tions, requires large num­bers to be edu­cated at sec­ondary and voca­tional levels.

    Clare is, of course, very care­ful to state that she does not want to see invest­ment in sec­ondary and ter­tiarty edu­ca­tion at the expense of the pri­mary sec­tor. She is advo­cat­ing a more bal­anced approach that recog­nises the need for con­tin­ued and strate­gic invest­ment in all key sec­tors. This bal­anced approach requires cer­tain key ques­tions to be asked, and answered:

    • What are the skills a soci­ety needs to develop and strengthen its pub­lic, pri­vate and civic sectors?
    • How can a coun­try equip its next gen­er­a­tion with the skills to meet those needs?
    • How can edu­ca­tion and train­ing pol­icy bal­ance the imper­a­tives of sta­bil­ity, eco­nom­ics and civil inclusion?

    There’s a lot to think about in this piece, but I think I am per­suaded that the orig­i­nal set of MDGs failed to set a firm and sus­tain­able foun­da­tion for the bal­anced approach that Clare favours — given that the suc­ces­sor goals are being debated right now, I would hope that these are issues that will be given due consideration.

    I Am Malala

    November 16th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

    This has been cross-posted from my new blog at iamlearner.net, which I have estab­lished to sup­port and com­ple­ment my busi­ness web­site at consult.iamlearner.net.

    …the most recent fig­ures pub­lished by UNESCO in their Global Mon­i­tor­ing Report show that 61 mil­lion chil­dren don’t receive an education.

    A fur­ther 200 mil­lion remain illit­er­ate despite attend­ing school. Equal­ity of oppor­tu­nity remains a hol­low dream.

    The peti­tion in sup­port of Malala Yousafzai has now attracted almost 1 mil­lion sig­na­tures world­wide. As Gor­don Brown points out in a piece on the BBC news web­site, time is run­ning out on meet­ing the Mil­le­nium Devel­op­ment Goals. Progress has, to say the least, stut­tered, with many mil­lions of chil­dren still work­ing instead of learn­ing, many mil­lions of girls still being forced out of the class­room and into love­less marriages:

    We have around 40 months to meet our dead­line for uni­ver­sal edu­ca­tion. We have one chance left to deliver in these three years. If the tragic story of Malala tells us any­thing, it is that we must do all we can to achieve it.

    The Tal­iban thought they were halt­ing a one-girl cam­paign for the edu­ca­tion of girls; instead they cre­ated the impe­tus for world­wide move­ment that should strengthen the resolve of those world lead­ers who meet at the joint sum­mit on this crit­i­cal issue of our time between inter­na­tional agen­cies and gov­ern­ments in April of next year.

    They need to do it for Malala and the many mil­lions of girls and boys around the word who are still being denied a basic edu­ca­tion. There is sim­ply no more impor­tant inter­na­tional cam­paign than this one.

    The greatest edtech development in 200 years? I hope so…

    November 8th, 2012 § 1 comment § permalink

    .…the same three-person team of a pro­fes­sor plus assis­tants that used to teach ana­log cir­cuit design to 400 stu­dents at MIT now han­dles 10,000 online and could take a hun­dred times more.…

    So said Anant Agar­wal, the com­puter sci­en­tist appointed by MIT and Har­vard this year to head edX, a $60 mil­lion joint effort (cur­rently includ­ing UC Berke­ley and the Uni­ver­sity of Texas, as well as MIT and Har­vard) to stream a col­lege edu­ca­tion over the Web, free to any­one who wants it. Their aim, in time, they say is to reach 1 bil­lion stu­dents by this means.

    MIT’s Tech­nol­ogy Review has pub­lished a busi­ness report on Dig­i­tal Edu­ca­tion that includes a piece that asks, is the MOOC the great­est edtech devel­op­ment in 200 years?, and another piece that takes a strangely myopic look at the devel­op­ment of the tech­nol­ogy of the MOOC (myopic because it gives not the slight­est men­tion to those who actu­ally syn­thetized the con­cept and who coined the term itself). Given that this is in the con­text of a busi­ness report, per­haps the some­what pro­gres­sive, left-leaning, anti-corporatist incli­na­tions of many of those involved in the ori­gins of the MOOC sim­ply keeps them below the radar of those writ­ing for the Tech­nol­ogy Review. I gen­uinely hope that is not the case.

    How­ever, while my ped­a­gog­i­cal sym­pa­thies are some­what closer to the MOOC’s prime movers, I also have a lot of admi­ra­tion for what the big play­ers are doing too. Cours­era and Udac­ity, as well as the likes of edX, are all non-profit social enter­prise ven­tures, and while their ped­a­gogy is pri­mar­ily a ‘knowledge-delivery’ model (as opposed to social-constructivist or con­nec­tivist model), they are very much part of a broad-based set of devel­op­ments in edu­ca­tion that, I believe, are coa­lesc­ing into a major storm that will sweep through the struc­tures and assump­tions of for­mal insti­tu­tional edu­ca­tion in the next few years. Of course, there are many other MOOCs out there too: Stephen Downes offers a recent list of inter­na­tional providers.

    Agarwal’s quote at the top of this piece itself con­firms that these big MOOC providers are basi­cally tak­ing the model of deliv­ery straight out of the lec­ture halls and class­rooms of higher edu­ca­tion and onto the Web. That’s fine, so far as it goes, but it means that much (most?) of the real power of the MOOC as orig­i­nally defined, namely that knowl­edge is dis­trib­uted across a net­work of con­nec­tions, and that learn­ing there­fore con­sists of the abil­ity to con­struct and tra­verse those net­works is dissipated.

    That foun­da­tion in the ped­a­gogy of the lec­ture the­atre also means, of course, that the big providers are also hop­ing to find the com­mer­cial holy grail of trusted, authen­ti­cated and secure accred­i­ta­tion via the MOOC.

    Nonethe­less, it will be inter­est­ing to watch what the effect will be on all those uni­ver­si­ties across the world cur­rently licens­ing courses from the big providers. I doubt that they are licens­ing their own anni­hi­la­tion, as some of the more lurid com­men­ta­tors might sug­gest; but i do think they are has­ten­ing a mas­sive and wel­come shift in the cen­tre of grav­ity in higher edu­ca­tion globally.

    The MOOC is a devel­op­ment that, like all great inno­va­tions, is a cul­mi­na­tion of inven­tions, for­ma­tions, think­ing, exper­i­men­ta­tions, mis­takes and tri­umphs that came before it; it is also like all great inno­va­tions in that it is a game-changer. The game is chang­ing in higher edu­ca­tion, and in edu­ca­tion gen­er­ally — of that there is no doubt — and while the MOOC can only be a part of that change, it is a crit­i­cal part. The MOOC will never be able to cope with all the require­ments of learn­ing and of study: there will also be a need, in some dis­ci­plines for lab work, ground work, work in the field, what­ever. But there should be lit­tle doubt that the MOOC is a major devel­op­ment in education.

    So, the great­est edtech devel­op­ment in 200 years? I cer­tainly hope so!

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