There is a continuing frustration amongst many that for the past decade we've talked so much about the potential of digital media for learning, but that it hasn't translated into enough action. I wonder whether this is to do with the way we're expressing our vision(s) of the way it could be.
I've been working recently with teachers and creative agents from the Creative Partnerships programme in England and with startups from Eastern Europe and the UK in The Difference Engine incubator. Between the worlds of schooling and startups we've been concentrating on the same thing: how do you find out what it is you are actually doing so you can communicate your goal most effectively?
Most people's answer to this is a long, winding mission statement of intent, full of abstract concepts that are impossible - or difficult - to translate into meaningful actions. My first post with Cisco's GETinsight blog is very much on this theme: if you want to bring people along with you on a big change, whether it requires digital media or not, everyone needs to understand what the vision means for them.
Firstly, Benjamin Zander's take as orchestra director and conductor is incredibly helpful (from his brilliant work, The Art Of Possibility):
A Vision might
...articulate a possibility
...fulfill a desire fundamental to humankind
...never leave someone asking "but what about me?"
...be a picture for all time
...use no numbers, dates, measurements, places, audiences, products
...not reference morality or ethics - there should be no right or wrong
...be freestanding - pointing neither to a rosier future or a past in need of improvement
When I got thinking about my old school's motto - "Striving for Excellence, Caring For All" - I saw the part I had always liked ("Caring for All") but found that it let itself down on the first part. "Caring for all" I get, and can be translated through every action every teacher and student takes (and you can certainly tell when it's not been carried through into action). But "Striving for Excellence" wrangles against Zander's framework:
The same way of looking at things, and checking ourselves against it when we express ourselves on what we desire, applies in business. Steve Jobs outlines Apple's vision quite succinctly, and in a way that completely fits with Zander's vision:
“Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products…We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.”
They want to bring 'good' products to market - not excellent ones - and this goal is achievable. Nobody in the company can argue with this or their role in it.
If you're up for the challenge, share your school or company visions/missions in the comments below and have a go at reworking it along Zander's framework: does a new, more en-actionable vision emerge?
From the start of the process in early 2009, The Virtual Revolution’s production team envisaged two audiences: the first would be an online community who would help to develop the themes we would explore, clarify hard-to-grasp technological concepts, tell us when we were heading in the right or wrong directions, and really put their stamp on the finished programmes. In the tradition of the new breed of wikinovels, wikiarticles and wikifilms, this would be an open and collaborative project within a larger old media landscape that hoped to engage an increasingly disjointed and distracted audience in a new media way. In return, they’d have access to our rushes that they could use to spin their own documentaries about the web.As someone who has spent my professional life flirting with old and new media, the openness and collaboration was one of the biggest draws when I was approached by the series producer last March. From my point of view, it would be a gross oversight to create something on this subject without the input of the online peanut gallery.
The second audience would be the BBC2 viewing public. They needed grabby content “on rails”, as game developers describe it, evoking images of a journey viewed through a window. This was the paydirt audience: watching the show that would get the reviews and the ratings. The complex concepts that we worked through with the online community would be presented in an easier-to-consume, more streamlined way. And, despite my interactive bias, it turned out that this was where the art of storytelling really emerged.
What Aleks and her team produced is an emerging realisation that it's never as clear cut online as it might be in the world of "product marketing", where you're shifting a finished good to a client or customer. The process is where the innovation is most likely to happen, the final product (for the masses) is where the mainstream element comes in. However, the mainstream element that Aleks and her team produced was different, different because it was most definitely informed by the audience's reactions on the blog and, beautifully, by their own mashups of the filmed content the BBC gave away.
The task of creating a trailer for the programme led to many creative attempts being YouTubed: one of the cleverest is this device-switching-convergence-laden piece of art:
The video at the top of this post is amongst the most amusing, exploring the whitespace and cutaways that always end up on the virtual cutting room floor..
With Aleks it happened by accident, creating two separate projects: it wasn't an process without some turbulence:
"I was uploading a photo I had taken on the shoot to my Flickr site, or dispatching another update to my Twitter followers, when the director of photography asked: “Why?”
"For him and the rest of the crew, I was doing a lot of extra work that was distracting from the real reason we were there: to create a piece of non-interactive storytelling that would broadcast to a mainstream audience in a primetime slot."
Now imagine that for a breed of digital product with the potential to be mainstream but with the admission that there is a second, vital audience: the enthusiastic amateur that wants to rehash, remix, recut the original and make something not necessarily better, but certainly different. Take this further: the product your first audience produces is not merely a "nice to have", but core to how you cut your final product. The user-generated editing and user-generated content is but part of your wider editorial, production and developer team, all making a better product together.
Whether you're in the business of making television, designing digital products or designing curricula for the creatives of tomorrow, this co-production approach by design, not accident, should underpin the work we plan, because the results are not just more of a learning experience for the creators of content, but for the audience, too. Learning together, pushing and pulling on the content through digital platforms, ultimately makes for a better end-product that is reviewed, rated and assessed.
Will outlines a conversation with a superintendent, one of whose parents wanted her child pulled from a classroom where, frankly, some brilliant learning and teaching practice was taking place. The reason?
“Our students don’t need to be a part of a classroom experiment with all this technology stuff. They need to have a real teacher with real textbooks and real tests.”
My immediate thought is that "the real teacher" with "real textbooks" (not up-to-date student-curated wiki ones) that she refers to is increasingly a "fake education", one that does not prepare youngsters for the reality of life when they leave school at 18 years old, or a 4pm.
My killer example has to be that, in learning how to publish responsibly to a textbook wiki with a worldwide audience this teacher's students will not be making the same mistake as Kimberley Swann, pictured above, whose story shows a complete lack of understanding in how the real world actually works, or 'Lindsay', whose Facebook lifestream sums up her media illiteracy in one snap:
If Lindsay or Kimberley had been taught by a real "real teacher", maybe they'd have not only had a conversation at some point about how one uses social networks for both play and work, as part of your public face, they may also have had, subject to the filtering policies in their schools, some hands-on practical sessions in privacy settings and the art of communication on the net.
…How about Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), presented as an Exemplar Text, for 9th graders? When I grappled with Wordsworth's great principle of emotion recollected in tranquility as a grad student, I figured I had only myself to blame.
According to the Burlington Free Press account, both Obama and Douglas offered toasts with glasses of water. One can only wonder what the people devising the Common Core were drinking. The Exemplar Text lists offered as an appendix to the Common Core are baffling -- and ludicrous -- at every grade level.
In order to qualify for the pots of money President Obama is eager to hand out, states must accept 100 percent of the Common Core standards document. They cannot pick and choose. Exercising any judgment based on what teachers and parents know about kids and about literature is forbidden.
The common core problem with these common core standards is based on two basic premises which, I believe, no curriculum should forget:
i) if you're wanting to change education you've got to involve education from the start. And, even when you think you've done enough collaboration, add a bit more: Scotland's curriculum has been in the making for at least eight years and still people want more time to reflect on what it means for them. The mistake we're making, I think, is not just getting on with it and tweaking as we go. Scotland has a problem with not "releasing early, releasing often" (in theory, at least - I think of the hundreds/thousands of educators I know about who have been teaching along these lines for years);
ii) curricula are there to provide framework and scaffolding. They are not there to do the choice of building materials, the types of brick, the layout of the rooms or the interior designing of our learning. Politicians abroad, and closer to home in our own education blood bath of impending elections, would do well to remember that.
As a side-note, I find it vaguely amusing that the Columbus Dispatch, citing Ohio as the first state to adopt the Core Standards (above), features an advertisement for the Titanic exhibition. How appropriate.
"It's like the teacher's gone on a course and come back with something new. Except it's like that every day."
A quote recently overheard by Pat Chapman. As a teacher I know what that feeling of coming back with something new is. I don't know if I managed it every day, though, when I was dealing with unnecessary summative assessments, requests for paper from bosses, and lessons where the pace was unnaturally high to 'get things done'. I did have it when I was doing project-based inquiry-based student-led programmes of work over six weeks, rather than 60 minutes. You?
Entering the Palace of Bones from Papa Sangre on Vimeo.
Papa Sangre has been in development since mid-last year, having been commissioned by 4iP as the world's first audio-only, 3D audio no less, video game for mobile:
Papa Sangre is a video game with no video. It’s a first-person thriller, done entirely in audio by an award-winning team of game designers, musicians, sound designers and developers. We’ve created an entire world using the first ever real-time 3D audio engine implemented on a handheld device. Which was BLOODY HARD.
I do like a bit of doing the opposite, a touch of Edward de Bono's 'Po' way of thinking. It means you come up with interesting ideas (that no-one else did) and new ways of perceiving the world around us. And it wasn't easy - they had to blast sound into thousands of sound sensors attached to an imaginary head to get the 3D sound experience the final game will bring.
Papa Sangre should be on the educational iPhone app list of any school as a superb source of thrilling inspiration.
Follow on Twitter and Vimeo so you don't miss more audio examples and its release later in 2010. And prepared to be scared.
Continuing on from the stimulus of an English chef who knows his vision - to eradicate obesity - and wants us to "pass it on", I saw this piece on a US school making a huge difference to its learners' potential futures:
"I never had a doubt that we would achieve this goal," King said. "Every single person we hired knew from the day one that this is what we do: We get our kids into college."
While I don't think anyone in his school would argue that they are not also about producing "rounded individuals", "a caring environment" and all the other edu-fluff that we see in mission statements from schools and curricula, this school CEO in Chicago, working with an all-male, all-black school population in a deprived area, knows exactly what vision he wants achieved.
The next action for every member of that school community - teachers, parents, students even - is clear: get our kids into college.
You might not agree with it being the core aim, and we don't know what the next step of each individual might be (exam-bashing? constant revision? inquiry-led learning? who knows...), but at least the vision is clear and tangible. At least people know what to do, in concert with each other. What's your vision going to be?
Whether through over-zealous editing, poor transferal of interview material from me, over compression of complex arguments or the fact that newspapers feel they can only put online what little will fit in the paper edition (and in the case of the TESS, put even less online than in the paper edition), After being misquoted in a national education newspaper, for which the journalist has apologised (thanks), I feel moved to clarify some of the remarks attributed to me.
I also feel obliged to point out the boon that Glow, the national schools intranet, offers, something that will not make as sexy a story as the journos might want but which, frankly, matters a damn site more than their headlines.
The original quote was lifted and, I believe, altered for Friday's Times Education piece, originally from an interview which coasted onto the subject of Glow and its Virtual Learning Environment. Glow does have a traditional VLE element, but VLEs and Glow as a whole are different. Becta, the UK technology in education agency, has its own take on what VLEs can offer and it is largely based around the administrative advantages:
VLE can help teaching and support staff manage and deliver a variety of daily tasks, including:
- general class administration and organisation
- the creation of lesson plans using existing resources
- assessment and monitoring of students
- allocation and marking of on-line assignments
- discussion and support with students on line.
The various interactive tools of VLEs can also support learners with both class work and homework, and can cater for individual learning styles. For example, students can:
- submit and track their assignments on line via a personal home page
- contribute to and participate in discussions with classmates and other schools via the various conferencing tools
- work at their own pace within and out of school – this is particularly beneficial to learners with special educational needs, such as students in hospital or children unable to attend regular classes for health reasons.
In this respect, I feel that most VLEs on the market today are like virtual filing cabinets, places where one can store virtual worksheets, PowerPoints with which to kill even more learners and summative assessment tools to finish off a few more.
Glow offers a VLE, with the summative assessment element hugely stripped back, reflecting Scotland's world renowned work in Assessment for Learning, but it packs in a heck of a lot more.
Most of Glow's impressiveness comes from its participation tools. Take, for example, GlowMeet. It is a game-changer, technologically to some degree but more through the imagination of teachers, Local Authorities and the central education agency managing the project, Learning and Teaching Scotland. In the past few months we have seen conferences between over 600 students and a world-famous author (though virtual book-signing still hasn't caught on), 1000 pupils learning about the Scottish puffin, a circus virtually attending school, and a master printmaker sharing his skill with the next generation.
It is a game-changer in that video conferencing with, say, Skype is a relatively one-to-one experience between classes. Glow encourages one-to-many and many-to-many experiences within a context, and as a result it helps spawn new connections between participating schools with a shared vision, shared outcomes and share culture that would take, relatively speaking, ions on the open, social web.
Case in point: when I was developing 22 international connections a year through blogs, wikis and podcasts at Musselburgh Grammar School I thought I was living the dream. It was just a shame that while we courted enthusiasm and links with schools on six continents, we failed to convince the teachers down the corridor that sharing materials and ideas and conversations online was a worthwhile exercise. Making international connections between learners is actually quite easy. Finding those connections within your own country can be a lot harder.
2. Do people who use VLEs change their pedagogy for the worse? Can VLEs "de-skill" teachers and students?It can happen - and there's research to support this. The research is from the Higher Education world, but much of the VLE instructivist stuctures of HE VLEs like Blackboard are shared by one of the UK school system's most popular VLE platforms, the Open Source Moodle. The main risk comes from people using the VLE as their only technological tool, mistaking it for a learning tool rather than an organisational one, and not a) being aware of other potentially better tools for certain jobs out on the open web and/or b) not having access to them because of web filtering policies in individual schools or school districts.
This risk of pedagogical down-skilling is therefore very real in any environment where heavy blocking or filtering of communication and learning tools online (e.g. Web 2.0 technologies) prevents their use or prevents students and teachers experimenting to see what their potential uses might be.
Even if web access is opened, there is then a requirement to provide ample training opportunities in the pedagogical changes one might make in the light of these ever-changing toolsets on offer, especially for those who are less comfortable online. Without this, the likelihood, says the research, is that teachers will fall back to the lower, organisational baseline of technology on offer through the VLE.
Again, in Glow, things are a bit different. There is a toolset that is a) already far more than simply organisational, b) opens up both experienced and less experienced web users in the teaching population to learning opportunities afforded by video conference, shared whiteboards and asynchronous discussion through forums, for example, c) actually designed for learning and collaboration, not organisation, and d) constantly developing (since autumn 2009, at least) to offer tools more akin ot those available on the wider web, but with the added value of a Scottish education community (through authentication) with shared values, goals and outcomes.
3. We're missing the real story: internet filtering is our biggest challenge
Glow will gain more power to its elbow, however, when the abilities of teachers and students to incorporate more of the freely available, but currently blocked, content to their learning journeys.
This is not a Glow issue, though, and it's a mistake to blend the issue of filtering with the use of a VLE or communications and learning platform like Glow.
However, Glow's infrastructure offers an enviable world first in terms of reach and depth: not only is there a technical infrastructure, but there is a human one, one that can help set up those lessons of how to navigate the big, wide, wild web out there. To do it, though, we need the courage of Local Authorities to open up their access more and more, and empower this glowing network of trainers, students, teachers and enthusiasts to take the lessons we all must learn on web literacy and pass them on.
The way things are going, though, it looks like Scotland will be the envy of the world for its national intranet and the ugly duckling for its 20th Century approach to modern literacy. While England and Wales take the issue of opening up networks from blocked to managed to student/teacher-managed web access, Scotland's policy document doesn't even mention it - in fact, it copies the English statement word for word and strips out mention of how filtering should be approached.
This is the story. This is the sexy headline. This is the issue that we need to tackle much more aggressively.
I hope this is clear. I hope that it makes enough sense for people, should they wish, to challenge it or support it. I, frankly, want to move on, to explore and challenge this filtering issue. And, no, you can't quote me on that.
Failure is an option, but fear is not
What I see with increasing regularity is that education leaders are gripped by the notion that failure is not an option (à la Nasa) and that fear will prevent that happening. Meanwhile, on the ground we see teachers prepared to take measured risk, putting their previous fears to one side, and accept, as they ask their students to do in learning, that there will be some degree of failure before we get to where we want to be.
I'm quite clear on who I think needs to change their game.
Jamie Oliver is more well-known in the UK for his crusade against fast food in schools here, and he's doing the same through a new television series in the US. I'm only amazed that his passionate and shocking TED video, above, hasn't been mentioned by more educators in my own aggregation of 1650 blogs (and the one that did, a Canadian, home of the dark hole that is Tim Horton's). Food, after all, is responsible for far too many of the behavioural and learning problems we have in our schools.
He won the TED Prize this year for his "Pass It On" philosophy: teaching kids how to make 10 healthy tasty meals would eliminate America's $150bn extra cost for food-related illness.
Take this idea and tell three people. If we all did this 25 times over, then the whole population of the US would know about it.
It's simple, and there's a target we can all imagine reaching in the near future. This is the kind of sharing, too, that needn't take a long time or a huge effort, and whose outcome and benefit is clear to all: I'm finding that sharing in and of itself is still something the value of which many teachers need convincing.
What's the succinct vision you'd like to share and can you find a tribe of three other people to take your message forward?
The Telegraph reports that the average Briton sees 10 extra days of work added to their year as a result of always-on email through devices like the Blackberry.
Yesterday, in a workshop that included an overview of some productivity tips for coping with more information, I made the point that for teachers more than any other profession, the notion of push always-on email was abhorrent:
I was astonished, though, at the resistance to this concept. I'd have thought that good email management was a release for everyone, yet a few folk still felt that they had, in the course of the workshop and my keynote, received some useful emails which they wanted to think about. Fair enough, but they weren't concentrating, weren't able to concentrate, on the really challenging stuff I was trying to get them to think about. Their choice, and one I often make in a conference situation.
But we must always give ourselves the opportunity of maximum mental bandwidth at least once in the day to deal with the complex goals we're trying to achieve.
Pic from Kendriya in Andy Polaine's Lost In Text Flickr group (permission pending).