The Seven Spaces of Technology in School Environments from Ewan McIntosh on Vimeo.
I'm delivering the opening keynote for Edinburgh University's IT Futures Conference today and was asked to deliver an expanded version of the work I've been doing on the physical spaces of learning, and how they transgress virtual learning spaces, too. The theme of the conference is fascinating, and a conversation I'd like to see happening more regularly in more schools:
It will look at both the staff and student perspective of what the working space is, and is becoming. Where does technology fit in, and how do we work and study in this increasingly mobile world?
The video above is the short, 15 minute version of the main points. More notes and further reading can be found in its related blog post.
In a small Local Authority in Scotland, thousands of students, parents and teachers have been getting together to learn and share their snow-day experiences on an open source blogging platform. 25,000 visits a day, 1827 posts and 2477 comments were left throughout the three or four days of closed school this week on eduBuzz.org in East Lothian, Scotland.
Disclosures: Throughout 2005-6 David Gilmour, me and a growing bunch of enthusiastic teachers throughout East Lothian set about planning and launching eduBuzz. It's a WordPress MultiUser platform where students, teachers and parents can share their learning as often as they want. In 2005, I ran a project for LTS to look at how to best engage teachers nationally online (each semester we engaged at least two thirds of our demographic: languages teachers). Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS), the organisation behind the national schools intranet Glow, then funded me part-time for eduBuzz.org's development throughout 2006.
Glow has also been hailed as successful during the snow-bound period in one or two Local Authorities, but it's not really clear how successful - there are no national statistics yet for last week (the only usage information we have are 32 pdfs of rather vague, annualised, local data [how many are unique visits, returning visitors? What's the bounce rate?). From a couple of press stories and tweets it seems to have had about 700 daily clickthroughs on its shortened links, and 900 visits a day in one of its two most active Local Authority areas.
If we were to extrapolate the East Lothian success over these snow days in engaging people online (25,000 visits a day for 15,000 students) then we might have expected at least 415,000 visits from the 250,000 students off school this week. Glow hasn't performed this well, though, so what lessons might be out there for us to learn from the likes of eduBuzz and similar platforms in schools around the world?
What lessons on community has the snow-driven use of online communities shown us?
I was asked in November at a Scottish Government policy consultation:
"If you don't think Glow in its current form is what Glow should be, what would you do differently?"
I don't now know the whole recipe I'd have, but the one we mixed up in East Lothian five years ago has worked better and better over that time, with continued growth. I'd argue that the spike in traffic when snow somes to the country shows that it has a high local or at least Scottish audience. What are the elements I see in eduBuzz that have not been designed into Glow?
There are a ton of other things that have been 'done' to increase engagement, but the hat tip has to go to the teachers throughout East Lothian who, over the past five years, have come to believe in the benefit of sharing what goes on in their classroom day in, day out. That one principle is the hardest thing for people to 'get', and in East Lothian a significant and increasing numbers of teachers, the gatekeepers of a successful online learning community for schools, have certainly got it loud and clear. Nationally, there needs to be more of a campaign to help educators get to grips with the questions around sharing, issues that stretch beyond education and schools, and issues that too many have not yet understood. As well as being a tools issue, it's a media literacy one above all.
You can read more about the eduBuzz journey and how it grew in the early days to what it is now in my 2008 presentation, We're Adopting - A Social Media Strategy for Schools.
I know that given the education humdrum Stateside for the past few months, and the ensuing train wreck of the English education system, it might seem a patronising to suggest teachers might just take a moment to pause and reflect on what it is they do have, what they can be grateful for.
But when I returned from South Africa a couple of weeks ago, I had some video I had shot in a school on my first morning out and about. My suitcase was lost in transit, with the microphone, so the audio's not great, but the day-to-day struggles of Principal Juan Julius at Hout Bay High School, the struggle to provide his students the best education he and his staff feel they deserve, are enough to make compelling viewing this Thanksgiving:
We have a feeding scheme in the school. During the break I have to go up to the kitchen and assist the lady there, dishing and serving plates of food so that they can concentrate in class. I think sometimes the father-mother figure must come stronger than the teacher figure in this school environment. Because when you show love and you give love and show you understand their problems -- not that you say "yes I understand", but that you really sit down and listen and you grapple with the problems that they experience and you come up with actual solutions...
It's so complicated. Most teachers are just not interested in that. They're interested in the new house, a bigger house, the money in the bank, the nice house, nice clothes, the overseas trip, whatever.
I can't say that.
I had a holiday last in Scotland and that was more than 27 years back, because my money is not my money any more. My money, and my family's money, is the students' money. And that means a lot to me. We really, really make a difference. Everywhere else, it's about money, having enough money. If you need something you go and buy it.
But here, you appreciate what you have and look after it. The little bit we have we plough back into the community.
Food for thought the next time we concern ourselves with one less interactive whiteboard than we wished, or a laptop that takes too long to get repaired. Happy Thanksgiving.
This post was originally published in the Huffington Post.
When I mention that, in addition to working with schools and education departments on their learning policy and practice, I spend at least a third of my week working with tech startups, television and film companies, I get more than a few strange looks and raised eyebrows.
People just don't understand why anyone would "make life difficult for themselves" by working in two camps - business startups and education - which, on the face of it, have little tying them together.
I've spent three years on an occasionally painful journey learning how to structure deals, work out business models and build a business from the customer back. Within two weeks of starting that journey many of my former colleagues started referring to me as someone who "worked in media". I was no longer "in education". Some, in the past year, have let me "back into education", but trust me: blending two worlds hasn't been easy to explain and, for some, it's been too hard a concept to grasp.
Churning out the unemployable
I realised that, for all the talk of encouraging entrepreneurial attitudes in schools and giving more choice to students, too many schools still hadn't understood what's actually required to do this successfully, in a way that benefits society later. I thought that the best way to help schools understand how lessons, curricula or resources could be planned to this end would be to always spend a good part of the week in the sharpest end of that societal and business world.
So what? There's an example of the challenge if we don't get over our reliance on structures and methods of learning of old in a Harriet Sergeant Sunday Times comment piece from earlier this year:
The managing director of a medium-sized IT company explained why. High-flyers — Oxford and Cambridge graduates — are still as good as any in the world. His problems come when he tries to recruit middle management. Last year he interviewed 52 graduates — all educated in state schools. On paper they looked “brilliant students”. Each had three As at A-level and a 2:1 degree. He shook his head. “There’s a big difference between people passing exams and being ready for work.”
This was obvious even before the interview began. Of the 52 applicants, half arrived late. Only three of the 52 walked up to the managing director, looked him in the eye, shook his hand and said, “Good morning.” The rest “just ambled in”. When he asked them to solve a problem, only 12 had come equipped with a notebook and pencil.
The three who had greeted him proved the strongest candidates and he hired them. Within a year they were out because of their “lackadaisical” attitude. They did not turn up on time; for the first six months a manager had to check all their emails for spelling and grammar; they did not know how to learn. It was the first time they had ever been asked to learn on their own.
What's so wrong with schooling?
And what are these old structures that lead to the unemployable? I think Don Ledingham's summary of Alan McCluskey from the Swiss Agency for ICT in education sums it up: The 7 Tacit Lessons Which Schools Teach Children:
One part of the solution
When we're generating fresh ideas for a business and working through how it might work in practice, the process of Design Thinking has become one of our trusty tools. Some ideas around how Design Thinking might be one way of pivoting our practice - either strategically or tactically within your classroom - are now up on the Global Education Conference archive of my talk last week.
I realise that this approach alone isn't a saviour of schooling, and that there are many other tactics as well as strategic approaches that help move us away from a factory model to a studio model of learning. But the conversation that I find the hardest is with those who don't even see that the model is no longer effective, who believe that "it was good enough for me so...". So help me - are things so broken that we should replace them with thoughts shiny and used (and very often recycled)? Or can we do a renovation job on what we've got, as many would prefer?
Pic of a young suit fast asleep from Amir Jina
Russell Davies and Matt Jones speak sense in Wired:
"...We're facing working lives far, far longer than [the garden centre moguls] ever imagined. Medical and health technologies are going to nudge, prod and support us well into our hundreds, and economic and demographic forces are going to insist we keep working for most of that span. (Perhaps that's why so many of us are reluctant to actually get started?) Many of you reading this can anticipate working lives of more than 100 years. Which, on the upside, makes any notion of career-planning seem ridiculous -- the wisest response is most probably to do whatever is fun and remunerative at the time. Entire industries are arriving and then disappearing within the span of a single working lifetime -- and this will not get any better. The idea of working your way up the ladder seems faintly ridiculous when said ladder is being set on fire from below, dismantled from above and no longer has anything to lean against.
"My friend Matt Jones has posted some of his thoughts about this on his blog: "I'm going to be 40 soon. I find myself thinking about how to become a sustainable/resilient 50-yearold… 50 might be halfway through… it might only be a third of the way through my life. I've been very lucky for the past 20 years. What the hell am I going to do with all that time? How will I be able to pay my way? How do I stay involved and useful?" These are good questions, and ones I couldn't begin to answer, except that I'm sure older life is not going to be about careers; it's going to be about learning to learn and being ready and willing to start all over again. And it's going to be work that involves a lot of sitting down. Because extending our lives is one thing, keeping our knees going all that time is another."
Photo of Russell by Matt Patterson
Learning Without Frontiers - Disruption, Innovation and Learning, this January 9-11, just before monster education show BETT, is a must-attend to kick off your education technology year, and the last of 2000 tickets for the event are on sale now.
And if you buy your Premium Pass before November 30th you will get an iPad thrown in to your ticket pass, a ticket to the March "Evening With Sir Ken Robinson" event and a seat at the Learning Without Frontiers Awards. Get in now before they get snapped up!
I'll be at the event, capturing as much as possible on the blog and my YouTube channel.
LWF 2011 will bring together the equally high demand Handheld Learning, Game Based Learning and Digital Safety that Graham Brown-Martin and his partners have put together over the past four years. The Sunday Service on January 9th will provide a festival atmosphere for all the family, with a chance to trial the latest games and take part in a grand TeachMeet. Speakers will bring their expertise, research and classroom-based stories from the world of games-based learning, mobile technology and social media for learning:
Take a look at video from previous events to see the world class speakers on offer, and grab your Premium Pass ticket and free iPad before November 30th. Other cheaper tickets are also available at the moment.
"Community is a larger loose group with a common background defined in more focus by a smaller group with a goal who act."
I just came up with that in response to a question around the future of professional development on Scotland's national intranet, Glow. I was quite happy with it. What would you add? (In 140 characters, of course ;-)
