There's an interesting experiment happening on Channel 4 (UK) at the moment, which makes me wonder what learning, schools and teachers might borrow from nearly-now nearly-live interaction between audience (students, parents, community) and "reality subjects" (educators, school management).
The show reveals the life of a score or so of normal people living in Notting Hill are followed each week by the cameras, their week cut up into one hour of docu-drama, and broadcast that night. The difference with most docs is that the flow of the programme, week-to-week semi-live, allows the "characters" to interact with their public, through the online site, Twitter and Facebook, but also through real-life interactions in cafés and the street. It's called Seven Days.
Matt Locke, helping to mastermind the online-TV mix here, noticed something the other night that he'd never spotted before:
About half-way through the latest episode of Seven Days, one of the characters, Cassie, took out her laptop and started talking about how people were talking about her on the show’s website. Sitting at home, monitoring the performance of the site on my laptop, I saw a huge spike in traffic as thousands of other people logged onto the site to see what all the fuss was about. This spike was higher than we’d seen the week before, when the rush of people coming to the site on launch night crashed the servers, and even higher than the biggest peak we saw in the final series of Big Brother earlier this year. We’d clearly hit on something, but what was it?
This is new for television. It's less new for live conferences where panelists interact with audience for real and on Twitter, responding and adjusting as appropriate.
It would be totally revolutionary, and slightly uneasy-feeling, for the vast majority of teachers. How would you react if students were criticising, feeding back or applauding your professional - and potentially personal - life online, raw and ready for you to react to the next time you see them online or in person? For years students have done this behind closed doors, or on the way home.
As we enter an era of online group spaces arguably being the most comfortable fora for young people to discuss their lives, I wonder how this would jar or excite.
Notes from The Education Project, Bahrain, complete with spelling errors, misappropriations and personal bias added without necessarily letting you know. Enjoy.
From the "eminently sensible department" Charles Leadbeater pulled this one from his recent Learning From The Extremes (pdf) travels in response to the feeling (shared) that there is a relentless expectation to import so-called global notions of education and learning to cultures that risk being eroded or lost as a result. (By "global" we often end up actually referring, at best, to North America or, more specifically, the US).
Not only that, but current "global" education trends tend to suggest, according to some in the Bahrain audience, that unity on principles rather than disparate understandings are the most desirable way forward. Here's what Charles thinks is a more helpful metaphor for understanding learning in a globalised world.
We see people trying to adopt national standards in a bid to "bring things together", but what works best is where ultralocal circumstances can be harnessed. In Kerala, India, the most important thing to learn as a young girl is how not to get HIV+, but this is not something you get taught in school. This pull learning is based around learning being pulled in by the learner's self interest.
"The new skills" of 21st century learning cannot be "delivered", in the same way as we deliver a pizza. They are encourageable, but they're not teachable (EM: certainly once we're beyond the click here, drag there stage).
Instead, new skills are pulled in by learners. In the developing world there's a formula you notice:Education + Technology = Hope
This formula can be seen in India, Brazil and China slums because the education is not pushed, it's pulled. Education based around learning in community centres is cheap and based around interest, and it would be wrong for these countries to seek the expensive models of High Tech High or the Finnish system.But technology is an aspect they have in common: the only thing that is as visceral as drugs to get drugs dealers who run the favela to pull learning towards them, according to one founder of an 18-year-old community centre.
The mistake is if we try to scale industrialised (Western) models when really we're talking about how to spread principles. The Chinese restaurant approach is a desirable one: there are millions of Chinese restaurants and we know what we'll get there, but there is no "Chinese Restaurant" brand.
Another great piece on the notion of spreadability of media, which applies in many respects to the spreadability of learning, can be found in the whopping eight-part post by Henry Jenkins, starting here: If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead.
Pic from Todd
Notes from The Education Project, Bahrain, complete with spelling errors, misappropriations and personal bias added without necessarily letting you know. Enjoy.
Charles Leadbeater opened the first panel this morning by noting that education policy often sets about tackling the wrong problems with a ton of solutions. Instead, he believes, we should spend far more time finding the right problems to tackle.
In questions, an American working at University in the UAE made some interesting remarks about what she considered the main wrong problem we're tackling in education reform:
"Our students are going to the web because that's where the network is. We are tackling the wrong problem. The problem we're trying to solve is making the one teacher in one classroom better. Forget about it. We know that four-teacher classrooms with 100 students, teachers working together, collaboratively, as we expect the students to do, work better than one-classroom one-teacher setups. Teachers are not super(wo)men - they're normal people who, like our students, work better together than on their own."
Pic from GoldenDragon
The chaps at BERG are one team that I'd love to engage on designing what a school space should look like. Not content with reinventing how we might read through touch devices, several months before the iPad was launched, they've now taken the device and shown us that it's not for reading after all - it's for creating 3D light forms that can dance, write and recreate city-scapes before our eyes.
Watch their video in HD to see the finished result of their experimentations, read the blog to see how they did it and see the behind-the-scenes pics on Flickr:
Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.
Project-based learning, or PBL, that happens in schools nearly always seems to be based around fake problems. I don't know how we manage it as educators, but if we can find a lame problem that needs solving, we'll give it to the students. In turn, we largely end up with students who are happy to play the game of working our fake problems, and even proposing more fake problems themselves.
Design Thinking, the immersion, synthesis, ideation and prototyping process of creative thinking that I've witnessed in the creative industries for the past three years and have, for the past eight months tried to bring to more schools around the world, is about solving real problems. The type that affect real people's lives.
Part of this is to do with the physical space of the learning environment, something we can work on in small steps or in revolutionary renovations and rebuilds, as I described last week. Some of this we can do, though, through our aspirations and subsequent actions.
From the Stanford d.school site comes this story, showing how something as 'traditional' as "studying a book for English class" can be given the Design Thinking treatment and come out a far richer, far more educational and far more useful experience for all concerned:
Her students were reading the novel Monster, by Walter Dean Myers, and their design challenge was to "create a way for inmates to feel more comfortable in their cells." They used details from the book and pictures from the Internet to immerse themselves in imagining what living in a small cell would be like. Melissa gave her students cameras and Andy asked if he could take the camera to the jail where his father was currently serving time and bring back pictures to add to the class observation chart. Andy had not visited his father for quite some time.
At the facility, he was not allowed to take pictures. Instead, he took detailed notes. He also brought the book with him and read to his dad for over an hour. In recounting this story, Melissa said that she believed that Andy just needed a reason to visit his father and felt that he could contribute in some way to him though this project.
Soon after, she noticed that the book began traveling with Andy everywhere. It was always in his hand as he walked through the hallways, replacing his ever-present football. She believed that it became symbolic to Andy, representing a bonding moment between him and his dad, and a connection that he had been he yearning for. The following week, Melissa brought the class to the Elmwood Detention Center to prototype their designs. While there, Andy met Sergeant Liddle ,who tested their prototypes. After his positive experience at the prison, Andy has set a goal to become a police officer. Since that challenge, Andy has not yet been back to see his father and his football has returned to his hand. However, the design challenge became the hub of a wheel for Andy that brought together family, literacy and community.
Picture of the d.school learning space from my visit last week.
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: Learning for the future event, Glasgow Caledonian 9 December http://bit.ly/9Oy1GZ
If I said that your worst solutions for the challenges you're facing might just be your best way out of a tight spot, would you believe me?
When you ask a room of teachers (or any professional for that matter) to come up with their "best" solutions to a problem you often tend to get great ideas, but not always the best ones. They can be contrived and almost always involve some self-censorship from the team: people don't offer anything up unless they feel, explicitly or subconsciously, that it will get buy-in from the rest of the team or committee.
At a time when education budgets have never been smaller, and are only going to get smaller, this kind of thinking that defaults to the "old ways" of doing things - expensive committees, organisations, meetings, 'experts' - just won't cut it any more.
But ask people for their "worst" solutions to a problem and people tend not to hold back at all - laughs are had and the terrible ideas flow. And while the initial suggestions might feel stupid, pointless or ridiculous to the originating team members, these awful ideas can take on a spectacular new lease of life in the hands of another, unrelated group.
By insisting on a "yes and" approach, rather than a "yes but" approach, a fresh set of eyes can turn these "worst" ideas into the ones that will save money, improve service, or make people happier in the workplace.
On Friday last week I used this exercise with Scottish Borders Council who, like every public body in the UK, are seeking creative ways to maintain the quality of their services for millions of pounds less (they're already top of the charts in terms of their efficiency in delivering the quality services they do). The results were brilliant, and I've challenged the 160 or so leaders, from across education, roads, infrastructure, health, social work etc that I was working with, to share their ideas on a team forum and then put their ideas into action by Christmas. Some of the best worst ideas were:
How one 'stupid' idea could save £12.5m a year
I don't know the precise figure spent on fruit and vegetables, cleaning and gardening throughout schools in the UK, but these ideas, applied nationally, could have a positive effect on what and how students learn, as well as saving at least a few million (window cleaning alone is £25,000 a year in one English borough, which nationally would lead to a saving of at least £12.5m a year).
The inspiration to use this exercise came from Tina Seelig's great book, Things I Wish I Knew When I Was Twenty, a manual if ever there was one of creative ways of getting others, and yourself, to look at your school, business or parenting. Why not try it in your next Council or school session, and see how you can make services better for eveyone for less.
If you have a teacher who doesn't regularly reflect on how they're teaching, why they're teaching that way and who doesn't ask students, colleagues and parents how things could be improved the something happens after about 3-5 years of leaving teacher-training college: the teacher reverts to the way they were taught.
This line of research comes principally out the world of sports coaching, where many papers show that in times of extreme stress or imminent failure, coaches forget the progressive (and otherwise successful) coaching they were taught how to do and instead revert to the way they were coached, anywhere from 10 to 50 years previously.
It was the basis of an exercise I carried out with about 100 teachers on my recent tour of New Zealand, and was inspired after a two-minute conversation in the car home with Derek Wenmoth, one dreich evening in Christchurch.
I asked the teachers in two workshops to take two minutes and write down, without thinking too hard, their best experiences and then, in another two minutes, their least happy experiences in formal education (primary, secondary and further education). We put all their post-it notes on the wall in two columns and then looked for similarities, trends and opposing standpoints.
The convergence on certain themes was amazing. Here are the most positive experiences that came to light, with the most prevalent first:
and, here, the least happy experiences:
You can download the full transcription of their post-it notes here: download Most Happy Experiences and download Least Happy Experiences.
What do we learn from this?
Firstly, I'd argue that all the elements we see in the "least happy" list are observable in most schools at some point in one school semester. There are poor teachers, teaching as they were taught no doubt. They need to found and encouraged/made to reflect on their own experiences as a learner in order to improve their game.
I'd also argue that most classrooms, more regularly than the least happy experiences, exhibit plenty of the top behaviours we enjoyed as learners.
Thirdly, if we reframe the least happy experiences in terms of what remedies we might spot, we see yet more attitudes and policy choices that we've just been too slow and hesitant to implement:
Mathematics consistently comes out as an irrelevant or overly difficult subject to be learning - why are schools still buying in the old media that generates this confusion, and not empowering their own learners and staff to reframe mathematics with Meyer's "Less Helpful" lens?
Teachers who appear unapproachable, not really part of the class so much as a teaching machine - if we move from knowledge transmission models of learning to learning by making and doing, then the role of teacher naturally shifts from site manager to foreman.
Finally, I spot elements that we enjoyed as learners that are still struggling to get prominence in curriculum design and teacher attitudes:
This is a fascinating exercise to do with colleagues at your next whole-staff meeting, as a means of tapping into emotions and stories from their own pasts that help explain why the changes we've been talking about here for years need to happen urgently. And I think that the emotive element of this task is what makes the difference between a staff development day being just another set of things to do (or, more likely, shove into the physical or metaphorical cupboard), and that development day being something that touches at the core of teacher reflection and personal experience.
Try it, and share what your top Most Happy and Least Happy experiences are. Will we match or find different challenges in different regions?
Young people do, and they might just care about privacy more than the adults who care for them. That's what I pick up (with all caveats r.e. my reading between lines as well as on them) from the fascinating research on late teens and privacy that danah boyd has published with Estzter Hargittai:
Overall, our data show that far from being nonchalant and unconcerned about privacy matters, the majority of young adult users of Facebook are engaged with managing their privacy settings on the site at least to some extent...
...Based on data collected in early Fall 2009, Pew found that 71 percent of the 18–29–year–old social network site users they surveyed reported changing their privacy settings while only 62 percent of those 30–49 and 55 percent of those between the ages of 50–64 had. While Pew’s practice–oriented data do not measure youth’s attitudes towards privacy settings, the findings do suggest that younger users are conscious enough of privacy issues to take measures to manage which parts of their profiles are accessible.
While the paper is concerned with students in higher education, who have by now left the high school nest, I think there are some conclusions that we could work backwards into high school and even primary school, given that many in late Primary / Elementary are already experimenting with Facebook.
Above all, I'm increasingly aware of how little research we have in Scotland, in the UK and further afield into how young people approach social networking in our countries. Most of what teachers and school-based decision-makers here see is based on "assumptions that all users have a uniform approach to the site and how their accounts are set up are incorrect [leaving] certain user populations especially vulnerable."
I've also observed a marginalisation of any institutional action around how we teach youngsters to use social networking sites effectively in a schooling setting, with the shield of school intranets and virtual learning environments as "safe internets" abounding since 2006 (about the same time Facebook went public).
Notable in the report are some clues as to how we should approach our discussions and learning opportunities around Facebook with young people. Traditionally, in the UK at least, fear has been used as the number one blunt instrument to get young people thinking about privacy. CEOP (the "chop shop") are the UK agency responsible for chasing up and prosecuting instances where children's protection is compromised, yet their voice of "stranger danger" vastly overpowers those that point out the relatively larger benefits of taking some measured risks online.
Let's consider this notion first, as an adult. As an adult running his own company, but also as someone who wants to learn from other's experiences, I have learned and earned more from publishing my mobile phone number (it's +44 791 992 1830) and a safe contact address (i.e. not my home) as well as my general location (Edinburgh, but also other places I might end up day by day through the Dopplr platform).
As a student, what are the opportunities of sharing, though almost definitely not sharing a mobile number? Well, by knowing roughly which network you are part of it helps friends of friends you might socialise or have socialised with outside the structured social spaces one inhabits (school, home life, cliques) to find you and strike up a longer friendship than a happenstance encounter on vacation, at the weekend outing or foreign school exchange. Just an example, of course, which could just as easily have been in the role of Facebook in helping youngsters communicate around their homework or project work of an evening, or the role parents would like Facebook to play in communicating more between school, teacher, students and parents, or the role it might play in sharing learning of five year olds.
Julie Cunningham outlines the hypocrisy of which we're guilty when isolating online privacy in schools without as much effort deemed worth the while offline.
But these arguments, as I say, are all too often drowned out by the far more conservative (and therefore far easier to condone and express in public) attitudes that one should try to limit one's public sharing as much as possible, sharing only with those we know we know we know, the implication having been that we've met them face-to-face. Government officials request features that sound great, like the Facebook panic button, but which actually create more problems for those who really need help. And the argument that employers will not want to see your real life shenanigans online is just too distant a worry for most teens and tweens. That's just not the way the online world works when these youngsters hit late teen-hood and adulthood. We need to educate, not stipulate.
What approaches might work for increasing awareness of privacy management?
One simple approach to helping youngsters get an even better handle on how to manipulate their privacy settings in the way that will best work for them is just to talk about privacy settings. When Facebook prompted their own users to think about their privacy settings with a welcome screen message:
35 percent of users who had never before edited their settings did so when prompted. Facebook used these data to highlight that more people engaged with Facebook privacy settings than the industry average of 5–10 percent (E. Boyd, 2010).
We also learn that “a student is significantly more likely to have a private profile if (1) the student’s friends, and especially roommates, have private profiles; (2) the student is more active on Facebook; (3) the student is female; and (4) the student generally prefers music that is relatively popular (high mean) and only music that is relatively popular (low SD).” Therefore, if we can get friendship groups rather than class groups in school to learn together about these principles,we might stand a better chance of creating a culture of understanding about privacy.
What also shines through this report is that more frequent users of Facebook change their provacy settings more often, engaging more with the concepts of privacy the site throws up:
Avoid fear as a means of making young people think about privacy
The main reason we heartily discourage young people from engaging with those they know they know is fear: fear of stalking, bullying or making friends with someone you've never met face to face. boyd points out the shortfall of 'fear' as a tactic for instructing media literacy in youngsters:
While fear may be an effective technique for prompting the development of skills, the long–term results may not be ideal. The culture of fear tends to center on marginalized populations and is often used as a tool for continued oppression and as a mechanism for restricting access to public spaces and public discourse (Glassner, 1999; Valentine, 2004; Vance, 1984). To the degree that women are taught that privacy is simply a solution to a safety issue, they are deprived of the opportunities to explore the potential advantages of engaging in public and the right to choose which privacy preferences and corresponding privacy settings on sites like Facebook serve their needs best. For example, many young people value the opportunities to participate in communities of interest or peer–based production (Ito, et al., 2009). These communities support a wide variety of public practices — they serve as a distribution channel for participants to share artistic creations or promote their bands; they provide infrastructure for participants to learn about their practice or develop new skills; and, they provide a cohort for collaboration. In interviewing teens, boyd (2008) found that some girls who wanted to participate in these public forums were too scared to do so. Fear paralyzed some girls, limiting their engagement with some of the “geeking out” communities that Ito and her colleagues (2009) highlight. Furthermore, by adopting and promoting a gender–differentiated narrative that focuses on women’s safety matters, core issues about privacy that concern both men and women get overlooked. While our data do not allow a direct examination of these questions, future work should examine the role that safety rhetorics and fear play in online participation and practices.
(Emphasis added)
So what are those core issues about privacy that we might be overlooking in our quest to fear youngsters into a media literate approach to networking?
Photo: Private by splorp, shared, publicly, under Creative Commons licence on Flickr.com
On September 29th I'm hosting a live discussion with GETideas.org to see if we can't get to the bottom of the biggest barrier to educational improvement: what's stopping teachers, en masse, learning explicitly for themselves every day?
I make a big, but I think fair assumption: teachers do not have enough time on a daily basis built in to their day, either through structures or through personal choice to make the time, to reflect on their experience and engage in challenging learning about teaching. And I pitch this against mounting research that shows the best education systems in the world are the best thanks to one key trait: they have the best teachers.
From the blog post I wrote this week over on GETideas.org:
In the last eight weeks I've traveled on 30 planes. I am well versed in the most disturbing piece of guidance one is offered before take-off: "Make sure you fit your own oxygen supply before helping those around you, including young children".
The message is designed to make us have a mental check against our natural instincts - to help children first - given that if we don't look after ourselves first and foremost we'll not be in a position to help anyone.
I think teachers and schools need the same, regular safety briefing every time we start a learning journey. Teachers need to become much more automatic in their own learning habits before attempting to help youngsters learn for themselves.
In August I asked the same question to nearly 1000 educators throughout Australasia and California: "Is the teacher's job to be Learner In Chief?" The answers were not immediate, nor particularly sure of themselves when they did come. The challenge emerged thus: many of these teachers felt their main job was to teach, and that any learning they might undertake themselves is a rare, added bonus.
I believe the opposite should be true: teachers need to teach less to help learners learn more, and they need to put themselves in the position of learner far more frequently than they currently do.
Do you agree? Am I, Will Richardson, Alec Couros (discussion link) and others giving our teacher peers too a hard time by insisting on them learning how to make challenging changes in their practice? Are teachers learning enough through the occasional conference and chat about their day in the car on the way home?
I'd be delighted for you to join me on 29th/30th September (depending on your timezone) for this genuinely global discussion, normally with teachers and leaders from New Zealand, Australia, Europe and North America, and see what tactics or even strategies we can see emerging around the world to help teachers become the Learners In Chief of their schools.
(Pre-registration is required. Conversation best accessed by telephone (no charge) or Internet with microphone. More information here.).
In 6 minutes 40, the 20 ideas I think will affect educators in a big way in the next couple of years. This appears as part of New Zealand Core Education's EDTalks:
20. QR Codes and other smart mobile means of making the real world expand into the virtual world will become commonplace in the pockets of our students. With Layar you could craft a living history of your school transposed onto existing real-world buildings viewed through a smartphone camera.
19. We will gain a better understanding the hype curve, and what types of behaviour with technology can be spotted along it.
18. This gives us a chance to shorten that lead time to get to the learning quicker
17. Anything 'touch' changes the game, not necessarily because of the device itself but because of the way it affects the design of everything else around us, especially websites.
16. More will leave the desktop and go online, whether it's MIT's Scratch heading online next year thanks to the MacArthur funding we awarded earlier this year, or
15. Making real life products that students can feel, touch and use will be where the best learning takes place. Students will stop "doing" stuff at school and will more likely "make" stuff at school.
14. We'll think about how we build more interaction into our virtual spaces but also our physical spaces.
13. Think how engagement of the senses can do something as simple as encourage people to walk up the stairs rather than take the escalator.
12. The last 30% of our planet will get online in the next year as more of the world, south of the equator, gets powered up and online. This will mean an explosion in connections.
11. These connections will nearly all come from Africa and South America initially - most African countries are at the birth of their internet journey.
10. When we start collaborating with all these new partners at scale, we'll find that the ultrafast broadband of which our schools are so proud will become, rather quickly, slow-feeling.
9. This is especially true thanks to our changing TV habits. We'll be watching more television online than we do on the television, which will contribute to this higher demand for bandwidth.
8. We'll actually watch less television, but all of it online. Television choices will start to be made for us, using algorythmns to work out what we might want to watch based on our friends' and our previous selections.
7. We'll also stop just watching the television, and start interacting even more around it, online more than with the people in the same room as us. Maybe education will have a second chance at getting television use for learning right.
6. Understanding open data will become more important than social media has been in the apst five years.
5. This means, in the next two years, we might actually find ourselves with a teaching population that is more illiterate than the youngsters they are teaching, as this basic skill of understanding complex data is mastered by young people quicker.
4. There will be less money for spending in education, and innovation will start to appear as a result.
3. Open Source technologies will increasingly make us question why we spend so much on corporations' pay-for technology when so much else is available for free from passionate communities of practice.
2. The innovation will start to appear not from big industry making big things that do things for people, but from 'small' people in their bedrooms and startups making things that empower people to do stuff for themselves, and that includes learning.
1. And the people we're empowering will come at all ages, all cultures. The lead time for people to understand how they can become collaborators, makers and doers has decreased from the years and months of the industrial age to hours and minutes for new generations. Just see it in the way my daughter reacted to Skype over four minutes, from horror to fear to curiosity to comfort.
Students who explicitly write down what they think they've learnt, what they didn't understand and what they think they need to know next time tend to perform better as a result. It makes concrete the self-assessment and peer-assessment we know help them perform better over time (cf Inside The Black Box (pdf) for details).
Learning logs were a core part of my classroom practice, having seen the effects they have on improving student performance in the bilingual schools of New Brunswick in my first year of teaching. A student there would write down what they had learnt and what they felt they'd have to learn tomorrow in order to achieve the goals of the project they had set out on. In paper format they were quite tricky to manage, and as students peer-assessed there would be paper flying all over the place.
With the emergence of easier-to-use blogs around 2002/3 I started getting students to keep logs of their learning online, instead, initially using the extra time afforded by school trips, before getting more personal blogs set up to keep track of their learning.
At the same time, Darren Kuropatwa, a maths teacher on the other side of the Pond in Manitoba, Canada, had developed an even more manageable and, I think, even more empowering means of having students think about what they had learnt: the learning scribe.
In this podcast series from Alan November, Darren explains the genesis for setting these learning scribe posts up, where one student writes down (online) on behalf of the rest of the class what he or she thinks they all learnt, and what they think they've not understood.
If you've ever doubted how a piece of technology builds upon what we know is great teaching practice, this is it. Harnessing both the online nature of transparent reflection and the constraint of not having a laptop for every child, Darren was able to create a rich experience for every student.
"This is nothing like school. In school everything runs quite smoothly… You learn a lot more [this way]. I never knew how hard it would be to fight for your own job."
These are students talking about a student-driven project around the theme of a soap opera, whereby they had to create a non-scripted soap opera production, with the story of a paper plant about to go bust. It was initiated by the art teacher, but encompassed much of the business, language and creative side of the curriculum. It's fleshed out in the video above.
The genius part is that their art lesson, rather than being a prep for recording the soap opera, became the "art club" of the bust company that in which they were playing their roles. Their choice, not that of their teacher (and, I'd argue, not something that a teacher would come up with in isolation were (s)he to be forward planning like crazy).
Alison Ferguson, the teacher, puts it like this:
"You're not teaching in isolation. You're teaching in a much more natural way, as you would if you were bringing up your own children."
This is part of a series of new videos the Scottish Government have produced to try to help parents understand how learning and teaching is changing to better equip young people for the future. I'd argue that they're ideal for those teachers who are struggling to see what it means, too, and more effective than the thousands of pages of 'guidance' and 'advice' given with the Curriculum for Excellence so far.
My other favourite in this series is Pimp My Trolley, with more on the Learning and Teaching Scotland site.
I hope we can see more of these 'first hand' accounts of what a vibrant learning environment looks like - so much more powerful than the rhetoric or PDF hell we're used to.
We all want a curriculum that ensures the key skills for tomorrow's entrepreneurs and employment are taught and caught, but which empowers children to direct their own learning, don't we?
For the past year I've been part of the Steering Group for the RSA's (Royal Society of the Art, Manufactures and Commerce) Opening Minds Curriculum, a competence-based curriculum that is perhaps finding its moment as "organised education", whereby big institutions that do things for people, are being replaced by organisations that empower people to do great things for themselves:
Opening Minds aims to help schools to provide young people with the real world skills or competencies they need to thrive in the real world. It is a broad framework through which schools can deliver the content of a national curriculum in a creative and flexible way so that young people leave school able to thrive in and to shape the real world.
Opening Minds was developed by the RSA at the turn of the millennium in response to a belief that the way young students were being educated was becoming increasingly detached from their needs as citizens of the 21st century.
It is based on five sets of competencies, including Citizenship, Learning, Managing Information, Managing Situations and Relating to People.What is the impact of Opening Minds?
Opening Minds is now being used in over 200 schools across the country and is growing rapidly. In 2008 the RSA opened the RSA Academy in Tipton which is the first school to be designed around the principles of Opening Minds.
You can get more information on the impact of the RSA Opening Minds Curriculum in this pdf.
One of the reasons I'm particularly fond of this curriculum is its genesis, summed up in the introductory conference video from a couple of years ago by RSA Chief Executive, Matthew Taylor, above, who points out that parents, politicians and even teachers seem to be under the impression that a "bad" school will always be a school for which improvement can never happen.
There has also been a near worldwide acceptance, with the occasional ignorant backlash as yet another test or stricture is thrown in by the politicians, that learning competences is arguably more important than learning 'stuff', and the RSA Opening Minds Curriculum is all about learning the stuff through these very competences that make professionally and personally successful individuals thrive.
Find out more and shape the Opening Minds Curriculum at our October 19 Conference at the new RSA Academy
To help teachers, head teachers and those managing curriculum better understand the small revolution that's been happening over the past few years with this way of working, the RSA Academy in Tipton, near Birmingham, UK, is hosting in its new building a one-day conference. It's a superb opportunity to experience, at first-hand, how Opening Minds works at the RSA Academy and gives you a chance to help shape Opening Minds as it moves forward into its next phase of assuring quality and useful assessment in a school-owned curriculum.
It could be a first step towards having the support and mentorship from successful partner schools in rethinking curriculum and learning across your whole school. This is not an event for an individual maverick to go off and innovate on their own. This is a whole-school innovation process.
The morning will be classroom based, working directly with our Opening Minds Team Leaders and students. The afternoon will focus on how the RSA and the RSA Academy are working together to move Opening Minds forward.
We will be launching the Opening Minds accreditation system and the Opening Minds Award at this conference. These are initiatives which are vital to the future of Opening Minds and we hope you will want to be part of these exciting developments.
The event will be useful for schools already developing their Opening Minds practice; those considering Opening Minds as a curriculum framework; together with those schools who have built up a number of years of Opening Minds experience.
If you would like to attend then register your interest in advance.
The Byte Night Bedtime Story aims to beat the Guiness World Record for the world's biggest crowdsourced bedtime story in history. It's a great way to get students reading an (ever-longer) story and then adding their own 140 characters' worth, without the need to register for Twitter or another service - this makes it ideal for kids no matter how young or old they are.
What's more, you help raise money for Action for Children’s annual charity sleep-out event that takes place in various locations across the UK, this year on 8th October. There's no reason, in fact, why the sleep-out couldn't take place in other countries around the world, highlighting the plight of homeless children and raising some supporting cash in the process.
As of the time of writing you have 18 days to make your contribution to the story.
David McCandless' visualisations reveal amazing things. I've been amused, bemused, intrigued and shocked for the past few years by his Information Is Beautiful blog.
There's one example of visualisation that could help explain why my former colleague Derek Robertson has a regular meet with the press each year, at the same time, justifying (again) why video games are great stimuli for deep learning:
In the video above, McCandless highlights that news stories on violence in video games generally peak in huge numbers around November and April. Why November? It's the month that Christmas releases of video games appear. Why April? It was the month that the Columbine shootings took place and, every year since then, this is the point where the media would like to suggest to us that violent video games were responsible (even though, at the time, it was violent film that made the headlines, video games not yet having attracted that unwelcome kudos).
There you go - if we know it's coming, we can get ready for it.
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: E-research ethics event coming up in Amsterdam, October 2010. More at http://bit.ly/9xlzdT
