John Connell: The Blog

A piece in today’s Guardian led me to this amaz­ing exam­ple of human endeav­our and cre­ativ­ity in the worst cir­cum­stances. Wonderful!

Sean Con­nery, in his thought­ful mem­oir Being A Scot, tells the story of find­ing him­self on a plane seated next to a com­pa­triot, a young woman. Talk­ing to her, he found that she was a lit­er­a­ture stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Edin­burgh, and that she was cur­rently study­ing Dostoevsky’s Crime and Pun­ish­ment.

“Do you see any par­al­lels between Roskol­nikov, in the Dos­to­evsky novel, and the char­ac­ter of Robert Wing­ham, in James Hogg’s Mem­oirs and Con­fes­sions of a Jus­ti­fied Sin­ner?” he asked her.

“Oh, I haven’t read that,” said she, “I’m in the Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture Depart­ment, not the Scot­tish.” Con­nery was bemused, but pre­sum­ably did not bother to ask why, given her odd per­spec­tive, she was study­ing a novel orig­i­nally writ­ten in Russian.

Con­nery had left school at 13 with lit­tle to show for his eight years in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion other than an abil­ity to read. But early in his act­ing career, a fellow-thespian had sug­gested a list of books that the young Con­nery ought to read, and he had sub­se­quently embarked on his own edu­ca­tion in fine lit­er­a­ture. His young trav­el­ling com­pan­ion, on the other hand, had suc­cess­fully com­pleted seven years of pri­mary school­ing, five or six years of sec­ondary school­ing, and by the time Con­nery met her at least a year or two at uni­ver­sity. So what was the dif­fer­ence between the famous actor with his paucity of for­mal school­ing and the lit­er­a­ture stu­dent with a decade and a half of insti­tu­tional edu­ca­tion behind her?

In the lit­er­a­ture stu­dent, I believe that we can see some­thing of the schooled mind at work, in this case some­one for whom the books she read were pre­scribed by oth­ers and for whom read­ing was largely a means to an end. In Con­nery, a lover of lit­er­a­ture, we can see the inde­pen­dent mind of some­one who has taken con­trol of his own learn­ing, some­one for whom read­ing was a plea­sure in itself, and noth­ing to do with pass­ing exam­i­na­tions or gain­ing qualifications.

It is inter­est­ing to pon­der the dif­fer­ences between the truly autonomous learner and the schooled mind, to explore the nature of learn­ing in an age where, although the oppor­tu­ni­ties for self-directed learn­ing are expand­ing immensely as the ten­drils of the Inter­net extend into every facet of our lives, the endur­ing insti­tu­tions of the school and the col­lege and the uni­ver­sity (all of which I am happy to refer to col­lec­tively and con­cep­tu­ally as ‘the school’) remain stub­bornly tena­cious. This durable social con­struct, one that has been shaped and adapted con­tin­u­ously through­out his­tory to suit the needs of time and place and wealth and power, has allowed the myr­iad social, polit­i­cal and reli­gious enti­ties that have sus­tained it, and that con­tinue to sus­tain it, to retain an often insid­i­ous and reduc­tive grip on the minds of those who pass through their hands. And, despite that con­stant refrain of ‘the school is dead’ that we have heard in dif­fer­ent times and in dif­fer­ent places, the school is arguably stronger in some ways today than it has ever been.

Of course, the tale of Sean Con­nery and the young lit­er­a­ture stu­dent raises more ques­tions than answers: the gulf between the autonomous learner and the schooled mind is rarely iden­ti­fi­able as a sim­ple dichotomy between the free spirit and the cap­tive will. The real­ity for most of us is that we find our­selves, through­out our lives, shift­ing back and forth along a con­tin­uum some­where between the two extremes, although we night hope that, as we grow older, we become more aware of the dan­gers of the schooled mind, and there­fore develop a greater capac­ity to break free of the con­straints placed on us by the school in our early years. Connery’s self-taught love of lit­er­a­ture was per­haps not entirely free of instru­men­tal inten­tions: as an actor, he rec­og­nized that an appre­ci­a­tion of lit­er­a­ture would be use­ful to him in his career, but it was his own recog­ni­tion, not one sug­gested by oth­ers or imposed from with­out. Equally, the young woman, we hope, would have taken up her course in Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture because of a love of read­ing. But between those two routes into books, and most cer­tainly in the student’s response to Connery’s ques­tion, there lies a dis­cernible dif­fer­ence between the approach that each had pre­vi­ously taken to their mutual love of lit­er­a­ture. Con­nery, con­sciously or oth­er­wise, had dis­cov­ered that there is a higher and deeper and wider sig­nif­i­cance to learn­ing than can be gleaned from sub­mit­ting to the stric­tures of the class­room. The young woman had allowed her­self to be per­suaded that, like the over­whelm­ing major­ity of ‘edu­cated’ peo­ple, she had lit­tle choice but to accept those stric­tures as seem­ingly the only avail­able path to an edu­ca­tion in the dis­ci­pline that she enjoyed.

The road taken by Con­nery was one that led not only to a knowl­edge of fine lit­er­a­ture but also, I would con­tend, to a greater chance for attain­ing a degree of self-knowledge that, if not actu­ally denied by school, has rarely if ever been an explicit aim of school­ing. The school, his­tor­i­cally, has not actively encour­aged inde­pen­dence of thought, nor has it cul­ti­vated the truly spon­ta­neous or cre­ative mind. We develop such traits despite school not because of it. School is fun­da­men­tally about train­ing the mind, devel­op­ing the intel­lect (as opposed to intel­li­gence), pass­ing on the knowl­edge deemed impor­tant by a soci­ety to those whose role it will be to per­pet­u­ate and pre­serve that soci­ety at all lev­els. As such, the school con­tin­ues what already is and what has been; its func­tion, what­ever the rhetoric, is essen­tially back­wards look­ing, seek­ing to main­tain the struc­tures and rela­tion­ships from the past and present on into the future with min­i­mal change.

But given the ubiq­uity of the school, we can­not sim­ply equate the schooled mind with atten­dance at school. To do so would be ludi­crous. If the schooled mind were to be iden­ti­fied merely by dint of some­one hav­ing attended school there would no chance of escape from the con­di­tion for most of us. But school­ing does imbue the stu­dent, the scholar, with cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics that the learner has to find the means to over­come either while at school, or more likely once school­ing is complete.

I will come back to what that schooled mind is all about, why we must not be con­tent with the intel­lec­tual frame­work that school bestows on us, and how crit­i­cal it is that we are able to over­come at least the most dele­te­ri­ous and per­ni­cious aspects of the school’s legacy on our own devel­op­ment as ratio­nal, free-thinking human beings.

Evgeny Moro­zov dis­man­tles the lazy think­ing and the fun­da­men­tally anti-progressive notions out­lined in Gavin New­som’s recent book: Citizenville:How to Take the Town Square Dig­i­tal and Rein­vent Gov­ern­ment [bad book, so no link!]. California’s lieu­tenant gov­er­nor is taken apart in an arti­cle in Book­fo­rum.

[It is his] lack of any basic curios­ity about the tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions that he advocates—and espe­cially about their unin­tended consequences—that makes Newsom’s account so sus­pect. Pub­lic insti­tu­tions such as the BBC might be ter­ri­bly inef­fi­cient and scan­dal prone, but they still do a better—and more systematic—job at root­ing out cor­rup­tion than Newsom’s citizen-hackers armed with data­bases and sophis­ti­cated visu­al­iza­tion tools.

I don’t agree with every­thing Moro­zov writes (his Net Delu­sion described some crit­i­cal blind spots in our under­stand­ing of the Net today — delu­sion was too strong a word, but I sup­pose it helped to sell the book) but this piece gets it spot on with respect to Newsom’s Ayn Rand-induced, hacker-worshipping, anti-democratic nonsense.

Most of all, Moro­zov exposes the fun­da­men­tally con­ser­v­a­tive and regres­sive phi­los­o­phy that so many thought­less, slow-minded and mantra-spouting lovers of technology-for-its-own-sake mis­take for cre­ativ­ity, ‘think­ing dif­fer­ent’ and enlightenment.

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.

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 per­fect illus­tra­tion of the I Am Learner philosophy!

In a piece in the Inde­pen­dent, in 2011, Gor­don Brown wrote:

.…the inter­na­tional aid sys­tem for edu­ca­tion is fail­ing the world’s children.

He was intro­duc­ing his UNESCO report — Edu­ca­tion For All: Beat­ing Poverty, Unlock­ing Pros­per­ity.

On a num­ber of occa­sions over the past 6 years I have been able to watch the work of UNESCO at close hand and in the process gained con­sid­er­able respect for the orga­ni­za­tion. In keep­ing with that, I do believe that this report is  a superb, detailed and com­pas­sion­ate sum­mary of the state of edu­ca­tion for mil­lions upon mil­lions of chil­dren across the devel­op­ing world. It offers a descrip­tion of a state of affairs that should bring shame to the rest of the world — we are fail­ing all those chil­dren very badly.

Early in the report, he states that:

No edu­ca­tion sys­tem any­where in the world is bet­ter than its teachers.

And he goes on later to say:

Teach­ers are the back­bone of any edu­ca­tion sys­tem. Ulti­mately, learn­ing is the prod­uct of what hap­pens in class­rooms through a rela­tion­ship between pupils and teach­ers. That is why no edu­ca­tion sys­tem is bet­ter than the avail­abil­ity, acces­si­bil­ity and qual­ity of the teach­ers it pro­vides, and the level of sup­port that it deliv­ers to those on the front line of edu­ca­tion in the classroom.

With I Am Learner in mind, this begs many more ques­tions than it answers, but it would be churl­ish in the extreme not to accept the core point being made, that good qual­ity teach­ing should be cen­tral to a good edu­ca­tional pro­vi­sion, and most espe­cially for the edu­ca­tion of young children.

It is a dis­mal and unas­sail­able fact that there is a mas­sive short­age of good qual­ity teach­ers across the devel­op­ing world, espe­cially, but by no means exclu­sively, across the coun­tries in sub-Saharan Africa. Accord­ing to Gor­don Brown’s report, the world’s poor­est coun­tries need some­thing like 1.8 mil­lion addi­tional teach­ers over the next three years alone to pro­vide even basic pri­mary edu­ca­tion to their chil­dren, as well as around 4 mil­lion more class­rooms and all of the most basic items of equip­ment that we might expect to find in those classrooms.

Brown is absolutely right there­fore to state that:

The world is today fac­ing an edu­ca­tion emer­gency. That emer­gency does not make media head­lines. But it has dis­as­trous human, social and eco­nomic con­se­quences. It is con­sign­ing mil­lions of chil­dren to lives of poverty and dimin­ished oppor­tu­nity, hold­ing back progress in health, rein­forc­ing dis­par­i­ties linked to wealth and gen­der, and under­min­ing prospects for eco­nomic growth. And it is destroy­ing on an epic scale the most valu­able asset of the world’s poor­est nations – the cre­ativ­ity, tal­ent and poten­tial of the young generation.

An edu­ca­tion emer­gency indeed, and one on a vast and mas­sively con­se­quen­tial scale for human­ity world­wide. It requires equally vast and pro­longed global invest­ment to put right.

Else­where in the report, Gor­don Brown enthuses over the poten­tial for har­ness­ing tech­nol­ogy to improve edu­ca­tional pro­vi­sion. How­ever, he believes that:

New tech­nolo­gies do not offer a quick fix for sys­temic prob­lems in edu­ca­tion sys­tems. What they do offer is a vehi­cle for improv­ing access to oppor­tu­ni­ties for edu­ca­tion and the qual­ity of ser­vice provision.

The last thing this global emer­gency needs is any kind of quick fix. But I do believe that there is a poten­tially pow­er­ful appli­ca­tion of dig­i­tal and net­work­ing tech­nolo­gies that could play a sig­nif­i­cant role, along­side all the other big invest­ments needed, in con­tribut­ing to a much bet­ter qual­ity edu­ca­tion for many mil­lions of the poor­est chil­dren in the poor­est coun­tries around the world.

From Mas­sive Open Online Course to Mas­sive Open Online Class­room (MOOCl)

Any­one with even the remotest inter­est in higher edu­ca­tion of late will be aware of the MOOC. The basic con­cept of the Mas­sive Open Online Course (a term devised by Dave Cormier) is a sim­ple one, but the impli­ca­tions of the MOOC for the future of higher edu­ca­tion in par­tic­u­lar are the stuff of a debate that is wash­ing around global edu­ca­tion at the present time.

I will trust that any­one read­ing this already knows what a MOOC is, although I will not nec­es­sar­ily trust that every­one knows that there are MOOCs and there are MOOCs. If your knowl­edge of the con­cept of the MOOC is restricted to those ‘deliv­ered’ by the likes of Cours­era or Udac­ity, then I would urge you to go back to grass roots and read some of what you might find, for instance, in MOOC.ca, set up by Stephen Downes to host news, infor­ma­tion and dis­cus­sion around the con­cept, in the writ­ings of George Siemens, Dave Cormier, already men­tioned, and oth­ers. Open, exper­i­men­tal and con­nec­tivist in nature, the MOOC is an explicit and con­scious attempt to use the incred­i­ble affor­dances offered by the Inter­net to change the nature of education.

The massive-ness, open­ness and online-ness of the MOOC are all givens, of course, and are all crit­i­cal to the effect that the devel­op­ment is hav­ing at the present time. But I, for one, am less sure that the course-ness of the con­cept has to be a given too. I would recog­nise that the fact that the MOOC is built around the course is prob­a­bly what is keep­ing the con­cept fairly firmly within the broad arms of higher edu­ca­tion, for the moment at least. As Mar­tin Weller has written:

…after a decade of OERs, it’s inter­est­ing that we’re com­ing back to edu­ca­tor con­structed courses…

Class­room instead of Course?

When I look at the sit­u­a­tion faced by those mil­lions of chil­dren world­wide, in a con­text of poten­tial mas­sive global con­nect­ed­ness, and yet in cir­cum­stances where so many of them have no access to good teach­ing, I can’t but help won­der how the MOOC might be taken, re-shaped, and made into some­thing that could begin to ame­lio­rate some of the worst effects of that gen­er­ally awful situation.

I recog­nise, of course, that such a sim­ply stated change is, in fact, any­thing but sim­ple. The course is a gen­er­ally uncom­pli­cated thing, usu­ally (although by no means nec­es­sar­ily) lin­ear, struc­tured, a com­pre­hen­si­ble process in which ideas or con­cepts or infor­ma­tion are intro­duced, dis­cussed, dis­sected, re-shaped, com­bined, under­stood; it can be a sin­gle unit of ‘instruc­tion’ or a whole pro­gramme of learn­ing, or some­thing in between; and it can be deliv­ered or pre­sented (taught) by a sin­gle teacher or in some senses by every­one on the course (as the orig­i­nal con­cep­tion of the MOOC seeks to achieve).

The class­room, even the vir­tual, con­cep­tual class­room, is a quite dif­fer­ent beast. It is a ‘place’, a plat­form; it is the site where courses can hap­pen, where teach­ers can offer lessons across all dis­ci­plines, where learn­ers can go to access learn­ing, debate, insight, exper­tise, author­ity; it is a meet­ing place in which edu­ca­tion can hap­pen; it is the locus for teach­ing and learn­ing activ­i­ties of all kinds.

I believe we have many, per­haps most, of the ele­ments already that would have to be brought together to cre­ate the MOOCl. Instinc­tively, how­ever, I feel that a MOOCl would not be nearly as sim­ple as a MOOC to start up and sus­tain. It would require an oper­a­tional core of a kind and scale that is prob­a­bly not true of the MOOC, although that oper­a­tional core, I would sug­gest, need not be a sin­gle orga­niz­ing unit: it could be an open, dis­trib­uted affair, sym­pa­thetic to the ori­gins of the MOOC. It should offer access to masses of great teach­ing and learn­ing resources — the Khan Acad­emy is an obvi­ous exam­ple of what could be utilised, but so too could the thou­sands of other high qual­ity, freely avail­able teach­ing and learn­ing resources that increas­ingly throng the web, and across so many of the world’s major, and not so major, languages.

So far, so what? All of these resources are avail­able today. But the MOOCl would have to incor­po­rate some kind of orga­niz­ing layer, a sim­ple inter­face that would allow any indi­vid­ual any­where in the world not only to access the resources as such, but also to access courses, com­mu­ni­ties, teach­ers (who can be, and prob­a­bly will be, other learn­ers), exper­tise and guid­ance. The MOOCl might also be a device for those teach­ers who already are on the ground, so to speak, in the poor­est coun­tries, to grab hold of and use as a means of enhanc­ing their own teach­ing exper­tise. The MOOCl would be the teacher’s global men­tor, guide, teach­ing assis­tant, just as much as it would be the learner’s teacher too.

Again, you might say, this sounds like a descrip­tion of the World Wide Web. But the MOOCl would have to be more than sim­ply ‘avail­able’: it would have to be set up in a way that would allow it reach out in a proac­tive way, to find its way into those places in the world where we know there are young chil­dren who cur­rently have few or no teach­ers to help them learn, where there are few or no teach­ing and learn­ing resources. This will require much thought, huge orga­ni­za­tion, and of course invest­ment. Is there a role here for the big phil­an­thropic foun­da­tions as well as gov­ern­ments? I believe so.

But what of access to the net­work, access to con­nected devices? Of course, the MOOCl would have to be capa­ble of being used across the world’s mobile net­works and acces­si­ble on mobile devices — Gor­don Brown’s report tells us that mobile cel­lu­lar pen­e­tra­tion has reached 50% in the devel­op­ing world and is still increas­ing fast. The cell phone is the default access device for many mil­lions of peo­ple in the world’s poor­est coun­tries, and that is likely to be the case for many years to come.

How much of this can be done in the same spirit as the orig­i­nal MOOC? I don’t know, I sus­pect not much, but I would love to be proved wrong. I know I am merely scratch­ing the sur­face with an unde­vel­oped and poten­tially still­born idea — but if the acute minds of thought­ful and cre­ative peo­ple can come up with the MOOC, I would like to think those same, and other, minds could be applied to how we can turn the Mas­sive Open Online Course into the Mas­sive Open Online Class­room to serve the des­per­ate des­per­ate needs of so many mil­lions of chil­dren in dire eco­nomic and edu­ca­tional poverty across the world.

• Every user has the right to free­dom of expression.
• Every user has the right to con­trol their own data.
• Every user has the right to choose and change their social ser­vices providers.
• Every user has the right to host their own social services.
• Every user has the right to com­mu­ni­cate with any other user, regard­less of their ser­vice provider.
• Every user has the right to take their data and rela­tion­ships with them.
• Every user has the right to choose their own name.
• Dif­fer­ent users have dif­fer­ent needs.
• Com­mu­ni­ca­tion must be decentralized.
• Com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­to­cols must be standardized.
• The inter­net is capa­ble of more.
• Con­ver­sa­tions change the world.

If this sounds good to you then go look at the Tent Man­i­festo (and at Tent itself, of course)!

Thank you to Ben Werd­muller (of Elgg fame) and Stephen Downes (of Stephen Downes fame ) for the link.

All those cur­rently invest­ing mil­lions in Face­book stock should take note: Tent is just one tiny straw in the wind that will even­tu­ally blow that mon­stros­ity and so many oth­ers like it com­pletely out of the water.