Rupert Murdoch isn't someone I'd normally have flocked to for advice on how to transform education, but I was delighted when a contact at the EU forwarded me a speech he had delivered to senior government officials from around the world this May.
Murdoch makes some powerful points that speak the language of Government and business, two groups that must be convinced the current conservative and Conservative means of bullying learning into doing better just will not do. Here are some of the most compelling parts:
Every CEO will tell you that we compete in a world that is changing faster than ever. That it is more competitive than ever and that it rewards success and punishes failure to a greater degree than ever before.
In other words, our world is increasingly, and rightly, a world of merit. In such a world, the greatest challenge for any enterprise is human capital: how to find it, develop it and keep it.
No one in this room needs a lecture about how talented people in tandem with technology are making our lives richer and fuller.
Everywhere we turn, digital advances are making workers more productive - creating jobs that did not exist only a few years ago, and liberating us from the old tyrannies of time and distance.
This is true in every area except one: Education.
Think about that. In every other part of life, someone who woke up after a fifty-year nap would not recognize the world around him.
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My friends, what we have here is a colossal failure of imagination. Worse, it is an abdication of our responsibility to our children and grandchildren - and a limitation on our future. As Stendhal wrote: "Qui s'excuse, s'accuse".
We know the old answer - simply throwing money at the problem - doesn't work. In my own country, we've doubled our spending on primary and secondary education over the last three decades - while our test scores have remained largely flat. The reason this hasn't worked is that more money has fed a system that is no longer designed to educate - it's become a jobs program for teachers and administrators. And yet we Americans wonder why we have cities like Detroit where nearly half the population can't read and the disadvantaged are on a fast-track to failure.
The mandarins of mediocrity will tell you that the problem is that the kids they are teaching are too poor, or come from bad families, or are immigrants who do not understand the culture. This is absolute rubbish. It is arrogant, elitist and utterly unacceptable.
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If we knew we had a gold mine on our property, we would do whatever it took to get that gold out of the ground. In education, by contrast, we keep the potential of millions of children buried in the ground.
Fortunately, we have the means at our disposal to transform lives.
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Technology will never replace the teacher. What we can do is relieve some of the drudgery of teaching. And we can take advantage of the increasingly sophisticated analytics that will help teachers spend more time on the things that make us all more human and more creative.
Let me be clear. What I am speaking about is not the outline of some exotic, distant, fictional future. Everything I have mentioned is something I have seen in the here and now.
Download Murdoch on Education - The Last Frontier, May 2011 - it's worth 10 minutes of your time.
Photo from the World Economic Forum.
Jeremy Clarkson in the Sunday Times (UK) a few weeks ago touched on the supremacy of shaky mobile phone footage in deciding the pecking order of what we, generally, consider important and what we care less about (below). In this tree-falls-down-nobody-sees-it philosophy, have we become dependent on the loudest, clearest, best presented stories to make our decisions, at the expense of more valuable but less tangible ones we need to chew over for longer?
For me, this move towards talking about what we hear about loudest and clearest, rather than talking about the hard stuff that does not come in this "chicken nugget" form of information bundle, is absolutely reflected in the world of education discourse, particularly around discussions on what learning is for.
The echo chambers of the blogosphere, the political classes, the civil servants, parents... they - we - are all as guilty as each other for paying too much attention to the loudest, not necessarily the most vital, discussions for our children's future.
It's too easy to believe that you are collaborating and gaining some kind of otherness just because you've ticked the "collaboration box" of using Skype, a wiki, a blog, whatever medium you wish. Gary Stager picks this up nicely in this Will Richardson post. Will despairs at a teacher's 'inability' to grasp the value of a change to his methods, particularly the perceived value of collaboration to achieve the same goals that the teacher was gaining within his four classroom walls. Rightly, Gary calls into question whether collaboration is really all that worthwhile, all of the time. The answer is: most times not. Small active mixed ability and mixed interest teams, coming up quickly with their own ideas, is often just as effective (if not more so) than a more drawn out collaborative process through technology with teams from around the world, but where those teams consist of people who share the same values, aptitudes and interests as the home crew.
All too often, though, the accents of those with whom we are collaborating, in the broadest sense of the word 'accent', are merely reflections of the views with which we are most comfortable. In this way, we fall for the trap Jeremy Clarkson outlines in his column: "It used to be said if it bleeds, it leads. Now, though, if you want it to stick, you need a pic."
May 24th, 2006, John Johnston, David Muir, Andrew Brown, Bob Hill and a visiting Will Richardson were amongst a small but merry band who got together for the first time to talk about the potential we saw for learning as a relatively new set of democratising platforms and attitudes came together in a perfect storm. Between May 24th and the Scottish Learning Festival that year, I'd coined the phrase "TeachMeet" to describe this meeting of minds.
Five years on, the movement of professional development for teachers, by teachers has never been more vibrant, never been seen as so important by those holding ever tighter purse strings and looking for alternative models.
To celebrate five years of work by thousands, and to shine a light on the movement for those who've maybe still not come across it and its cousins around the world, I've brought together some voices to show the spread of ideas, and to suggest their own tips on organising the perfect 'unconference' professional development:
If you want to contribute your own post, tag it #teachmeet - I'll do my best to pick up on them and bring together a summary of your favourite moments and learnings from the past five years.
Pic from Ian Usher
In schools and in 'educational' media created for young people, the adults always give too many instructions rather than investing in better structures for thinking.
Gever and I ran a session together today at INPlay where we wanted to take educators, games designers and media producers through the experience of being a learner again, learning how, not what, and hopefully gaining more empathy for the five year olds for whom they design media products.
We kicked off with some structured constrained activity, but with no knowledge of what the final result looks like, using John Davitt's LEG to find loosely structured activity for our delegates. The picture above shows one group doing "A 12 Bar Blues as a Mind Map", but harnessing filled glasses of water, laid out to create a blues tune when struck in sequence with a spoon.
We then asked the producers to conceive of a new experience, rather than an educational product, concentrating for 8 out of 10 minutes on experience, and only at the last moment working with the idea on what it might teach a youngster. It was hard for teams not to slip into the habit of tying things to curriculum-filling exercises, but there were some genius kernels of ideas generated after teams concentrated on empathising with what it feels like to be a four/five year old wanting a great engaging experience, first and foremost.
Our goals?
What works better for young people and creative designers alike, is not instruction from on high (with a degree of tacit pre-task knowledge of the outcome already in the teacher's mind - and quite possibly the learners') but structures within which the learning journey, or game, can play itself out.
Structures for learning include formative assessment tools, good questioning, the use of learning logs to chart learning and what learning direction the student thinks they need next, design thinking structures, or Gever's Brightworks learning arc structure.
With these last two structures the name of the game is divergence of thought and investigation. It's only having explored a large amount of content that the learner creates their plan for what they will construct from it. This doesn't work if the teacher feels the need to organise it, to direct, to instruct. It only works if the youngster is free within the confines of a structure.
Is there a difference between instruction and structure? I think so, but am amazed that until now I hadn't discovered much appetite for exploring the difference between these terms, and these approaches, in the world of game design, media production and, vitally, teaching and learning/instruction/schooling/education.
This is the most depressing picture out of yet another stellar Gever Tulley keynote, this time at INPlay11, a conference I help curate in Toronto, where play, learning and the video game industry meet. An infant's picture, graded. C+. I wonder what the + was for.
There are two things I despise about how elements of learning have been systemically misinterpreted in pretty much every school setup around the world. One is teacher-designed homework, and the pathological belief, against the odds, that it adds any value to the learning process. The other is the use of grades to justify the teacher's existence, while destroying the confidence, self-esteem and understanding of what learning is for amongst our young people.
As Gever suggested, there is one chap who covers both areas particularly well with great roundups of his research and others'. All school governors, principals and decision-makers in Government would be in a more informed position to make some seismic changes to the happiness of young people and the families, with whom they row every night about homework and the mission for great grades, after a read of Alfie Kohn's The Homework Myth and Punished By Rewards.
"The best new media team in UK political campaigning history."
It was with immense pride in what we had achieved as a country, and the part I had played as part of a genial team, that I heard these words from Angus Robertson MP, the Director of the 2011 Campaign for the Scottish National Party (SNP), as we celebrated a Scottish Parliament election win with a majority that, in the theory behind the design of the Scottish Parliamentary system, was never meant to be possible.
I've written in greater detail about the strategy behind our winning campaign, and linked to much of the press coverage on this in the last few days, over on the NoTosh website. But there are lessons from this political campaign for those of us trying to build better learning communities. At the core of the online campaign was, after all, community building, and we did it in short term, with next to no budget, to great effect.
No-one in the UK - or Europe - has come close to what a small HQ team, a couple of external team members (NoTosh friend Ian Dommett, myself and a team of crack creatives), and legions of volunteers and activists achieved over the past 100 days. The newspapers, the Party's leaders and tens of thousands of commenters on our Facebook pages and blogs have put it quite simply, using five words: "We won. We made history". 
When I started work on the campaign's digital strategy and tactics, with 100 days to go to polling day, all polls indicated that the Labour party were set to win: at one point we were 15 points behind challengers, the Labour party.
Hope did, indeed, beat fear. We redrew the political map of Scotland and, by engaging every demographic out there, helped make concrete the fact that the SNP really is Scotland's National Party.
We helped shift the public viewpoint from one where, six weeks ago, the party languished some 10-15 points behind Labour, to one where it finished with an outright majority of 69 seats in the 129 seat Parliament, a majority of Scots wanting a Scottish government working for Scotland in the form of the SNP.
The press have covered our campaign strategy, particularly the digital part I was lucky enough to co-direct with the inhouse head Kirk J Torrance. You can read about this in detail over on the NoTosh website. It's worth pointing out in that article the reference to the design thinking approach we took to generate, prototype and move forward over 100 ideas of digital and offline media engagement, an approach that resembles enquiry-based learning techniques and which generates significantly more workable, responsive ideas than drawing up papers, annual plans or working in isolation in a leadership team suite of offices.
There are a few points about this project which I feel have pertinence in so many domains, not just political campaigning, lessons which could be extracted to the world of learning, school leadership and building better learning communities:
For me, this particular gig is now over. But there will be other elections, other campaigns. None of the lessons we've got here are anything that a half decent consultant with some life experience and an overdraft couldn't find out from their local book store and some choice reads on the web. That is why I have no issues sharing these elements of what some might call the "secret sauce".
The secret of any sauce is, of course, in the subtle turns of the ladle that the entire kitchen staff put in over a service and that service, my friends, I've been very lucky to be part of for a history-making 100 days.
SmartCities Conclusions and Next Steps from Smart Cities on Vimeo.
This is a quote from Elke Van Soom, a participant in a design thinking workshop I ran last week for the European Union's SmartCities project. The project involves countries from around the North Sea region of the EU, and has explored how citizens can be involved in the codesign of their public services, making services better by offering their own observations, ideas and review. It's a challenging process that many countries are working hard to make happen, with varying degrees of success.
Elke's background is in the business of creating and executing great surveys and workshops with citizens, to gain greater insight. Her view is that both those commissioning research, as well as certain participants, can have their "eyes to the past, backs to the future", and that research should only ever be taken as part of a wider recipe involving the expertise of institutes likes hers, as well as the gut feels of designers involved in the process.
In education (and plenty of other domains), I see so much behaviour like this: "we tried this before and it didn't work"; "it works for Norway but it'll never be that good for us"; "we're already so busy with the things we have to do now that we can't spare the time and energy to think about tomorrow, next year or beyond". The defeatest poverty of ambition exhibited by these words creates as much of a barrier to overcome as all the actual barriers that might need to be brought down, remodelled or pushed to one side.
Words are important. I think these eight - Eyes to the past, backs to the future - should be uttered every time someone says it's not possible. We must gather all the information we can on the real challenges before us, bring it together, invent ideas and then try them out before anyone can make the call as to whether they'll work or not.
