Change comes from the ground up.

How to change education : from the ground up.

Readers of this blog will know that I am a big fan of Ken Robinson. But this time he goes that little bit further, IMHO, and starts to touch on those aspects that we, as teachers, can actually work on to see change - the change that we've all been on about for the past 10 years ... As usual, the Knight says is better than anyone - so listen to this carefully ... and then I share some other thoughts below.

Wow! There is so much in these 24 minutes. What follows are my observations and thoughts - but I'll couch my comments now by saying that this video, plus what I read in the Herald today have given me further insight into my own position on learning and teaching and what should be done. So this particular post will have a couple of sequels ... so apologies if it seems a little disjoint at the moment. 

So - my key take always from this

• The basics of education are "why we do this", and not any particular group of subjects
• purpose of education 1: economic - but the economic environment now is vastly different than the one in which current systems of education were set up ... And today we need adaptability and creativity (IBM research). These are 'bottom line' competencies that business want today but they claim that our largely one size fits all system discourages.
• Purpose of education 2: cultural - in an increasingly global environment, we need to understand other cultures and perspectives well. Value systems are not the same. It's interesting to note that he refers to the Middle East dramas at present. I think you only need consider the changes in the likes of Egypt, Libya and the like over recent years - changes there have not been driven by the leadership in the country - it has been by the people in the street finally saying they've had enough.
• Purpose of education 3: social - and we need to engage. Our society needs to be 'rediscovered' by every generation - and we can't do this without open debate.
• Purpose of education 4: personal - education is about the individual. We know individuals are diverse, everyone has different talents, interests etc ... But a key driver in education today is still conformity.

Robinson then makes the point about governments in general ruling from the top down - the command and control position. And I think about our current environment here in NZ (by current I mean over the past 10 - 15 years) where it seems to me that the teacher unions and many of the teaching profession are in conflict with the Ministry of Education and the Minister in particular. "You cannot run a system by alienating the people who do the work."

 

So, if getting back to basics means getting back to the student/teacher interface, and don't clutter it with other stuff unless it adds to that relationship, then we will have to 'undo' a lot of the "institutionalised" structures we have built. I have maintained for a while that there is far too much 'compliance cost' in education these days - teachers are spending too much time doing everything but teaching - there is a form (or several) for everything. Then of course there is the incredible workload that is the assessment regime.

 

There are a few other points that Robinson makes in the last 5 minutes of his talk that I think might be in complete contrast with an article I have just read from Professor Elizabeth Rata from Auckland University, so I'll stop for now and revisit this is another post. I have the feeling that, for me anyway, there are a number of issues that are becoming increasingly clear about what we can do and where we should head, and I'm looking forward to trying to put all this together over the coming weeks.

 

 

 

 

Reflections on old friends and past deeds

In 2009 I ran a series of classes with 13 year old students looking at the the future of education and we used ideas from The Horizon Reports. Despite the work being really quite challenging for students and staff involved, it did give the opportunity to students to self direct and take considerable control of their learning.

Now, for a number of reasons, we discontinued the project. The first site the girls put up to share their project was in March/April of 2009. It used the 2008 Horizon Report as its base and we rolled in a number of "guest speakers" by means of video and YouTube to help set the scene. Once the project was complete (April 2009) I thought "That's it - no one will visit this site ever again." So it was with some surprise that I looked several months later to see that the site was attracting visitors still. Into 2010 the site was attracting more visitors, though the site was not updated at any stage.

So, today in my inbox was the usual start of US school year updates ... and so I thought I'd go back to one of my old friends, Wikispaces, and just see if anything was still happening around the old site. Here's what I found. Looks like around 25 views per day pretty consistently ... most views are coming form the US, but a lot from Canada, UK and Australia too. Views from NZ hardly rank.

So - whatever these students did, and whatever they wrote and contributed, some people in other geographies are finding some value in it.

The other thing I thought about was my own blog - this one. I haven't written much this year - not that I haven't wanted to, just have not found the time/priority to do it. Despite this - the viewership has actually gone up! Now that tells me something!

Anyway - my reflection is this.

I blog for two main reasons.

1. Reflecting in a public environment about educational matters is important - to me anyway. It helps me clarify my own views and opinions.
2. Just maybe ... something I have to contribute will spark something in someone else, somewhere else.

I have students blog for the similar reasons.

And you never know how long after you said what you said - someone else might just find it useful. On this blog the main attraction has been the post on Google Docs as a time line creator. I put this up last year some time. Every day several seem to head to this page. Great. Whatever I said then was true at the time!

Project Tomorrow

Just been reading "From Chalkboards to Tablets: The Emergence of the K-12 Digital Learner" from the Project Tomorrow group. Apart from the easy read of the 17 page report about the learning opportunity that over 300,000 students say they want, the interesting points for me were the following ...
 "The impact of the teacher in the technology usage equation also appears to have changed. In 2003, 31 percent of seniors in high school said that their teachers’ lack of knowledge about how to use technology was a significant barrier to their own use of technology at school. In 2012, only 18 percent of students in grade 12 felt the same way. However, 40 percent of the Class of 2013 say that a major obstacle to using technology at school is that their teachers consciously limit their technology use." (Page 9)

 And from the very first page of the report ...

"Our coaches were mostly college students and they helped teachers set up their first email account, do searches for lesson plans online and format class newsletters. At the same time, these college students were tasked to work with students at the schools during their computer lab time and in afterschool programs. We soon learned that the coaches were engaged in a vastly different set of activities with the students than with the teachers. With the students, the coaches were setting up electronic pen pal relationships using instant messaging and social networking sites, conducting web quests with NASA, the Jason Project and National Geographic, and helping the students self-develop HTML and programming skills to create their own websites and multi-media presentations. More importantly than the difference in the sophistication level of the respective activities, however, was the seemingly insatiable appetite that the students had for using technology more effectively within their learning lives." So, if you believe the numbers, students believe 20% of their teachers lack sufficient knowledge about how to use technology to enhance learning. But 40% consciously choose to inhibit students use of technology. For the full report go here.

Paper.li - I had forgotten you

Just remembered I set one of these up a while ago - and forgot all about it. Time to renew my reading ...

Ken Robinson at TED - How to survive education's Death Valley

If you are a Ken Robinson fan, then you'll like this new version of several of his earlier talks. This was presented just a couple of weeks ago as part of the debut of TED talks on the US public broadcasting system (PBS).

There are plenty of messages here - and well worth the 20 minutes you'll invest in watching this. There are messages about learning (and teaching), and messages about investment in professional development. I'll leave the rest up to the knight of the realm - it's his talk and not many deliver a message better than this man.

Conveyal of Content is a Commodity

"Education teaches you to cope with certainty."
"Learning teaches you how to cope with surprise."
"Every day is a surprise. There is no certainty."

Stephen Heppell is well known internationally for his research and practical solutions and suggestions for the future of education. The three quotes above are from him - as part of a video put together about the future of learning.

There are a number of things that resonated with me when I watched this video. I'll mention them here and then put the video in for you to watch.

1. The video brings together the thoughts of a number of people that I have to some degree or other heard of and heard from in the past. Heppell of course has been to NZ a number of times and has somewhat of a legacy here. Seth Godin is another well known IT, marketer and thinker. Don Tapscott - whose quote opens the video - has written extensively about "Growing up Digital" and "Grown up Digital"
2. "The graduates of Education must be uniquely valuable, not identically valuable" - so says David Warlick.
3. More children will leave school over the next 30 years than have ever left school. Period. So, if we can make a small change now we will impact a lot of people.
4. I had only the night before seeing this video signed up to a course at coursera.org. So, I was pleased to see something I had gone past the mere viewing stage to see what the next level was like was featuring here. Labelled as the "world's best courses, on line, for free" I'm looking forward to taking my first course with anything between 10,000 and 100,000 fellow course members come February next year. Yes - you read right - 10,000 or more students. [Of course there are other similar ventures - like Harvards and MIT's edx site.]
5. A big point for me is one that I have made on and off now for several years. And that Daphne Koller says far more eloquently than I ever will... "conveyal of content is a commodity".

Here's the video ...



So - what will make the difference to the student of today ... the leader of tomorrow? Whatever you do, don't get bogged by the content - it will change and there are far better mechanisms than you to deliver it! Do get bothered with sharing the learning journey with those in your care. Foster creativity. Foster mistakes. Embrace that which makes the journey easier. Challenge existing "truths". And if you must assess, then build a meaningful assessment of learning that goes past the narrow confines of the examination paper and the examiners marking scheme. [I mean, so what if the student doesn't use the exact word that the examiner wanted them to use ... or they have just recorded an answer using one less line of working than the examiner was expecting... or they used a diagram to explain a concept that the examiner was expecting words for ... apart from the examiner, who cares? In "real life" you get the opportunity to discuss opinions and ideas ...]

CodeAvengers - awesome training site

If you are looking for a resource to help teach the fundamentals of HTML/CSS or JavaScript - then this is the place for you. I have used this site over recent weeks with a group of Year 9 students to introduce them to some of the basics of HTML - so that I could get them to some simple stuff using Google Earth to embed some images and video into a set of Google Earth place marks. To do this they needed the basics of image tags, anchor tags and text formatting and I was so glad that I found CodeAvengers for them to use.

The site introduces the various aspects of coding in HTML5 in a structured, fun way. You build a website on a phone-style console - the instructions are clear and concise. Help is provided (sometimes costs you points). I found that some of my students enjoyed the site so much that they did far more than I needed them to - some even completed the entire 20 lesson HTML/CSS Level 1 course.

Now - not only does the site have a very good series of lessons teaching all of the basics - but for the teacher it has a running record of how your students are progressing through. This image gives one of the summary progress views.

You can see at a glance student progress, plus the "points" they have received as they progress through the various lessons.

All up, CodeAvengers adds a significant resource to anyone looking to learn HTML/CSS and I will certainly be using this site again next year with students at Years 9, 10 and 11. If you are teaching any of this stuff, or even if you want to learn the language of the web yourself - then this is the best resource I have found to date. 

And if you are in NZ - support these guys - they are graduates from the Uni of Waikato I think.